Bloomsbury Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios

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. Review Andreas Musolff's book takes great strides in Political Metaphor Analysis, exploring a wealth of exciting discourses to rethink old and define new research avenues. A must-read for students, cognitive scientists and critical scholars of all persuasions. --Piotr Cap, Professor of Linguistics, University of Lodz, PolandThis is an amazingly informative and fascinating book on political metaphor. It teaches us about the significance and enormously complex reality of the use of metaphor in politics and beyond. In doing so, it poses new challenges to our theories of how we think metaphorically. --Zoltán Kövecses, Professor of Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary About the Author Andreas Musolff is Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of East Anglia, UK. His monographs include Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust (2010) and Metaphor and Political Discourse (2004) and War against the Public: The Language of Terrorism (1996, in German); he has co-edited further volumes on political discourse in Europe as well as articles and book chapters on metaphor theory.