Flow Metaphors in the Discursive Construction of Traditional Handicrafts in Vietnamese News and Heritage Discourse: A Cognitive-Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This article examines how Vietnamese news and institutional heritage discourse draws on the semantic domain of flow to construct traditional handicrafts as practices with origins, continuity, and vulnerability to disruption. Rather than assigning every historically water-related word to a single overarching metaphor, the study combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory, a cognitive-discourse perspective, and a MIPVU-informed identification procedure. The selected dataset comprises seven retrievable news and institutional heritage texts on craft villages. The preselected coding inventory records eleven candidate cases, seven of which are retained after conservative screening and source-level verification. These cluster into three patterns: STREAM/BRANCH categorises products and craft traditions; UNDERGROUND CURRENT constructs cultural vitality and the actors who sustain it; and DRIFTING construes products of uncertain origin as a source of market risk. The expressions corresponding to “decline/ebb,” “ups and downs,” “fading away,” and “falling into” are not treated as direct evidence for the FLOW domain because their immediate contextual structures are better explained by lexicalised decline, orientation, disappearance, or state-transition schemas. The exploratory findings suggest that flow metaphors do not simply reflect a fixed “wet-rice mentality”; instead, they function as discourse resources that organise relations among continuity, identity, preservation agency, and market pressure. The article therefore offers a cautious model for analysing cultural metaphor in Vietnamese and specifies the limits of cultural inference from a small, purposively selected dataset.