This doctoral research project is carrying out an analysis of how the concept of “the machine” is discursively developed, starting from, but not limited to, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, with the aim of revealing the historically mediated character of such concept. In this sense, the research departs from two main fields: Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), making special use of idealised cognitive models. The merger of these two fields will allow me to verify the fundamental hypotheses through the inspection of linguistic data found in different sets of corpora: “the machine” is an axis of human understanding and action since the beginning of industrial society. In other words, the intersection of these two areas will be able to account for the conceptual processes (as construal operations) that take part in the communication of ideology and alienation in general by naturalising a discourse of a concrete socio-political model that is born with the machine.