Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p> Research indicates that the <jats:sc>capital for government</jats:sc> metonymy appears more frequently in news articles published at weekends as compared to weekdays. This is attributed to the <jats:sc>time is space</jats:sc> conceptual metaphor: journalists approach the events they report on more holistically towards the end of the workweek. With the globalisation of online news reporting, we hypothesized that the occurrence of the <jats:sc>capital for government</jats:sc> metonymy in online news would be even throughout the week, exhibiting similarity across different languages. We analysed the metonymical occurrences of <jats:italic>Moscow</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>Washington</jats:italic> in English, Hungarian, and Turkish online news. Our results indicate that (a) the distribution of the <jats:sc>capital for government</jats:sc> metonymy across the days of the week is uneven; and (b) the presence of cultural micro-variation in the form of similar trends in Hungarian and Turkish as compared to British news articles. </jats:p>