Abstract
Since the early 1980s, a plethora of literature has appeared on the theory of metaphor in language and thought (e.g. Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005, 2014; Chilton and Ilyin, 1993; Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Ortony, 1979). Indeed, the complex cognitive mechanisms involved in the production and interpretation of metaphor have been a major area of inquiry that brought together researchers from a broad range of disciplines such as cognitive linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics and sociologists and so on. In this book, Andreas Musolff offers fresh insights to metaphor theory in the domain of politics. He proposes an original scenario-based approach to account for how political metaphors are conceptualized and interpreted within their socio-political and cultural contexts. Recurrent references were made to Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak and Meyer, 2009) in order to stress the historicity and variation of metaphor framing. The proposed approach is built on a rigorous analysis of copora which consists of newspaper articles, political speeches and online forums. A myriad of metaphoric passages was selected from different spatiotemporal settings and languages. The first corpus (EUROMETA) consists of political metaphors in German and English and the second one (BODYPOL) though lesser in size, considers the use of body-related metaphors in a variety of languages such as French, Dutch, Russian, Spanish and Italian.
The book is organized into seven main chapters with an introduction (Chapter 1) and a short conclusion (Chapter 9). Chapter 2 offers a synopsis of the War metaphor to showcase how metaphors develop over time to form a narrative. This was exemplified in the case of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic discourse, in which narrative grounded war figurative frames was exploited to normalize the aggressive political ideology of the Nazi party. In this context, the author argues that metaphor framing is a discursive process that does not necessarily entail the existence of a priori imagery.
Chapter 3 accounts for source domains related to family metaphor such as divorce, parenthood, solidarity and love. Here, the author claims that domain models are essentially embedded in the dominant narrative in a given community (e.g. United States, United Kingdom and European Union) and not selected arbitrarily. Brexit is taken as an example where many family-related metaphors are used by politicians to describe the issue as a ‘divorce’ between Britain and Europe. Chapter 4 closely analyses how the scenario metaphor Britain at the heart of Europe has emerged and metamorphosed in British political discourses since the early 1990s. Former Prime Minister John Major was the first to stress the position of Britain being at the centre of Europe to promote Britain’s integration with the European community. However, over the last few years and notably during the Brexit referendum, the scenario associated with this metaphor has been imbued with much negativity and pejorative connotations by British Eurosceptics.
Chapter 5 sheds light on the lifespan of Body-related metaphor scenarios which last relatively longer than others, notably those that reverberate in national discourses, for example, Beijing is the head in China and the Queen is the head in Britain. The following chapter (Chapter 6) further elaborates on the historicity of metaphor, with a focus on the development of the Parasite metaphor in political discourse. It illustrates with much clarity how racist attitudes are articulated metaphorically. This element is further expounded in Chapter 7, which aims to demonstrate how metaphors construct social identities where the emphasis is on the Nations as a Person metaphor.
With reference to Body and Person as source domains, Musolff argues, in Chapter 8, that the production of a metaphor is as variable as the understanding and interpretation of it. Cultural contexts, among many other variables, continuously (re)shape how a particular metaphor is produced and understood by individuals and social groups. Using questionnaires, the author asked students of different linguistic and cultural back grounds to describe their respective nations in terms of body/person. Their answers constitute a pilot corpus, which illustrates how the metaphor associated with Nation was framed heterogeneously either in geographical (Chinese informants, for example, Shanghai as the eyes of China) or physiological terms (European informants, for example, the Queen as the head of England). Drawing on the data, Musolff argues that scenarios being shaped by the cultural milieu are an integral part of the cognitive reception and construction of metaphor.
Through a meticulous data-driven analysis, the author argues for the non-universality of metaphor understanding and interpretation which could be framed in multiple scenarios over space and time. Ostensibly, Musolff puts a special emphasis on the narrative, argumentative, interactional and evaluative aspects of metaphors, inviting researchers to further scrutinize the link between metaphor production and reception through empirical means. Although this could be very rewarding, there are a few theoretical issues in the study of figurative language uses that cannot be adequately resolved by empirical approaches. Frequency and co-occurrence analysis, for example, would definitely yield meticulous descriptions of the contexts of metaphors. However, this will not be a substitute for the more abstract qualitative interpretation. As the author examines how metaphor represents nations and collective social identities in Chapter 7, there is a need here, I believe, to refer to the sociology of knowledge and social cognition to back up the claims made about the cognitive structures and processes involved in the understanding and interpretation of complex figurative meanings (e.g. Van Dijk, 2014).
All in all, Political Metaphor Analysis provides an in-depth analysis of a cluster of political metaphors and introduces a new analytical approach by exploring various theoretical avenues, with a special reference to Critical Discourse Analysis. It offers a detailed discussion of how metaphors function in political discourse by reflecting on the basic premises of Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and advancing a scenario approach to metaphor analysis. Andreas Musolff demonstrates, in particular, the relevance of corpus-based analysis of metaphors through which he consolidates the assumptions of the CMT and at the same time provides a critique that highlights some of its theoretical lacunae. Some of these shortcomings, as he argues, could be best resolved by rigorous empirical studies. Musolff provides a number of examples to show how multiple scenarios over political metaphors are discursively constructed and simultaneously challenged by audiences rather than being a systematic mapping between the source and target domains.
From a methodological point of view, the book offers a thought-provoking discussion of the underlying cognitive perspectives of the formulation and manifestation of metaphor in political and public domains. It makes an original and valuable contribution to contemporary literature on metaphor studies and discourse analysis. This book will be of interest to researchers in Cognitive Linguistics, Political Discourse Analysis, Literary Criticism and Metaphor theory.