Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe

220 Pages·2004·1.19 MB·English

by  Andreas Musolff (auth.)

Metaphor and Political
Discourse
Analogical Reasoning in Debates
about Europe
Andreas Musolff
Metaphor and Political Discourse
By the same author
MIRROR IMAGES OF EUROPE
KOMMUNIKATIVE KREATIVITÄT
ATTITUDES TOWARD EUROPE (co-editor)
Metaphor and Political
Discourse
Analogical Reasoning in Debates
about Europe
Andreas Musolff
Reader in German, University of Durham
© Andreas Musolff 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-0-230-29881-1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Musolff,Andreas.
Metaphor and political discourse :analogical reasoning in debates
about Europe / Andreas Musolff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysis – Political aspects. 2. Metaphor. 3. Analogy.
4. Europe – Politics and government – 1989– I. Title.
P302.77.M87 2004
401¢.41 – dc22 2004046495
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations and conventions viii
1 Introduction: Metaphor and Politics 1
2 Conceptual Domains and Scenarios 8
2.1 Metaphors in a corpus of public discourse 8
2.2 family scenarios for the European Union 13
2.3 Metaphor scenarios and public attitudes 28
3 Analogical argument in political discourse 30
3.1 Metaphor and argument by analogy 30
3.2 Analogical arguments based on journey metaphors 39
3.3 Metaphorical conclusions in public debates about
Europe: paths without alternative? 59
4 Corpora and the Semantics of Metaphor 63
4.1 Metaphors in general corpora 63
4.2 Corpus-based analysis of metaphorical meaning 69
5 Europe as a body politic 83
5.1 Corporeal and organismic metaphors in politics 83
5.2 The life cycle of Europe 90
5.3 health and illness of Europe 97
5.4 The organs of Europe 101
5.5 Corpus data and conceptual metaphor 112
6 Discourse History in a Metaphor Corpus 115
6.1 Metaphor and discourse “evolution” 115
6.2 The development of the european house in British and
German Euro-debates, 1989–2001 122
6.3 Do metaphors ‘evolve’? 140
7 Metaphor Negotiation 146
8 Metaphor as Deception 159
8.1 Metaphors as ignes fatui: Hobbes’s warnings of political
metaphor in Leviathan 159
8.2 Metaphor and rhetoric 163
8.3 Metaphor as sedition 167
v
vi Contents
9 Open and Closed Metaphor Scenarios 173
Notes and References 178
Bibliography 193
Index 1: General 206
Index 2: Metaphor Scenarios and Their Conceptual Elements 211
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to a great number of friends and colleagues for support
and encouragement during the research leading up to this book, among
them the late Christopher Upward and Colin Good, as well as Saskia
Daalder, Ingrid Hudabiunigg, Wolf-Andreas Liebert, Jonathan Long,
Peter Rolf Lutzeier, Brigitte Nerlich, Michael Townson, Martin Wengeler
and Jörg Zinken. Christina Schäffner, Josephine Tudor and Renate
Henkel, who read drafts of the whole book text at various stages, made
many essential suggestions for improvement and provided helpful crit-
icism and advice. Roslyn Frank, Sheila Glasbey, René Dirven and Zoltàn
Kövecses commented on versions of conference papers that became
chapters in the book. Wolfgang Teubert and Pernilla Danielsson at the
University of Birmingham and Eva Teubert and Heidrun Kämper at the
Institut für Deutsche Sprachein Mannheim gave generously of their time
and expertise to help me access and collect data from the Bank of English
corpus and COSMAScorpora. The research for this book was supported
by grants from the Art and Humanities Research Board of Great Britain,
the British Academy and the University of Durham.
vii
Abbreviations
BZ Berliner Zeitung
DAS Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt
DT The Daily Telegraph
E The Economist
FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
FR Frankfurter Rundschau
FT Financial Times
G The Guardian
I The Independent
MM Mannheimer Morgen
NSt New Statesman (formerly: New Statesman & Society)
RP Rheinische Post
SP Der Spiegel
ST The Sunday Times
SZ Süddeutsche Zeitung
T The Times
taz die tageszeitung
TS Der Tagesspiegel
W Die Welt
Z Die Zeit
EEC European Economic Community
EC European Community (organization that superseded the EEC)
ECB European Central Bank
EMU Economic and Monetary Union
EU European Union (follow-up organisation of EC, since 1994)
CDU Christlich-Demokratische Union (Christian-Democratic Union)
CSU Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian-Social Union = Bavarian
sister party of CDU)
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic
Party of Germany)
Conventions in the text
Metaphorical concepts, domains and scenarios: indicated by small
capitals
Metaphorical expressions: indicated by italics.
viii
1
Introduction: Metaphor
and Politics
Metaphors of political discourse and political thought have had a
dubious reputation for some time. More than three hundred years ago,
in his treatise Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes described the danger of
metaphors leading the human mind into intellectual and political
confusion:
(1) [...] The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by
exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; [...] And
on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words,
are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst
innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or
contempt. (Hobbes 1996: 36)
In recent discussions in linguistics, psychology and philosophy, the rel-
evance of metaphor for social and political conceptualization has been
acknowledged in much more positive terms. In particular, the school
of cognitive metaphor analysis, which George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson effectively founded with the publication of their seminal
work Metaphors We Live By in 1980, has produced ample evidence that
“metaphors play a central role in the construction of social and politi-
cal reality” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 159). Cognitive theory views
verbal metaphors and similes as reflecting mappings across domains of
knowledge that underlie the language users’ understanding of the world
in which they live, “allowing forms of reasoning and words from one
domain [...] to be used in the other [...] domain” (Lakoff 1996: 63).
From the cognitive viewpoint, what matters most about a metaphor is
its conceptual nature, not its ‘accidental’ linguistic form. In their second
collaborative book, Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson have
1