Metaphors in Political Discourse from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

The paper focuses on various ways in which metaphors in political discourse reflect the cultural and linguistic environments from which they emerge. It discusses conceptual metaphors and their linguistic realisations in popular pre-election discourse in English, German, and three Euro-Mediterranean languages (i. e. Slovene, Italian and Croatian). One of the main aims of the paper is to present a contrastive analysis model which combines quantitative and qualitative methods on the one hand, and top-down and bottom-up approaches to metaphor research on the other. Reference will be made to the results of a case study based on the contrastive analysis of a corpus of pre-election articles related to the American elections in 2008 which has been undertaken to validate the proposed model. Itwill be argued that while the selected languages conceptualise elections in similar ways, there are also significant variations which have cultural implications.

Keywords

• conceptual metaphors
• pre-election discourse
• cross-cultural differences
• contrastive analysis