Musolff Andreas. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios

Bloomsbury, 2016. — 208 pages.— ISBN: 978-1-4411-9700-9.Political metaphors and related figurative discourse tools are characterised by their variability and contentiousness. Using them, discourse participants try to gain competitive advantage over others by offering their audiences new meaning nuances, challenging each other and announcing political initiatives. It is here that metaphor as a means to change meanings – and thus, to change social and political reality – comes into its own.Political Metaphor Analysis provides an innovative approach to the study of figurative language use in political discourse by presenting empirical analyses based on a large corpus of political metaphors and metonymies, linking these analyses to theoretical positions and assessing their limitations and perspectives for further exploration. The 'classic' model of conceptual metaphor analysis, pioneered by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and expanded and amended over the past thirty-five years, is critically examined with regard to new findings about the variation, historicity, pragmatic exploitation, comprehension and interpretation of metaphors.As a central new analytical category, the notion of “metaphor scenario” is proposed and tested against various sub-sets of data. It allows to link hypothesised conceptual metaphors to narrative, argumentative and evaluative patterns in actual discourse and understanding processes, so that their cognitive significance can be more reliably gauged and theoretically modelled.Political conflct as war
Metaphors and concepts
Inferences from metaphors in relation to conceptual domains
Conceptual domains and metaphor corpora
Discursive frames in metaphor corporaMetaphors, cognitive models and scenarios
Political metaphor and family models
Two metaphor models – one domain?
Family scenarios
Further scenario functionsThe life and times of a metaphor scenario: Britain at the heart of Europe
Memories of a metaphor
The emergence of a metaphor scenario
Scenario development
Scenarios and blendsThe belly and the body politic
Memories of a fable
The body politic tradition
Body politic, corps politique, politischer Körper: Traces of national discourse traditions in metaphor usage
Historical explanations for the development of metaphor scenariosParasites, scrounging and the question of deliberate metaphor
Parasites, metaphor and etymology
Metaphorizations ‘back and forth’
Metaphor and racism
Immigrants as ‘parasites’
Metaphors as deliberately chosen scenario elementsNations as persons: Collective identity construction
Introduction: Speaking for a nation
From ‘extended hands’ to a ‘new Nakba’ in eight speeches
Nations as persons with social identities
Two case studiesUnderstanding political metaphor
The unpredictability of metaphor understanding
Interpretations of the nation as body metaphor
Interpretations of the nation as person metaphor

[b]Conclusion: How does scenario analysis fit into cognitive metaphor studies?