Political Metaphor Analysis - by Andreas Musolff (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Quotes

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.
Sonja Molnar, University of Salzburg, Austria

This 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.

Through an intriguing array of examples, Musolff provides a well-structured and interesting set of analyses of metaphoric language as used in the realm of current political discourse. He argues for the need to understand the historical, social, and political setting in which metaphors are used for the hearer/reader to appreciate their often powerful messages. This book builds on past work in metaphor theory, demonstrating an evolution to the next generation of analysis where generalities give way to careful consideration of more local and nuanced contexts. The result is a theoretical framework for the extended examples in the volume, but also a broader approach to contextualized metaphor which will serve well in a wide range of other semantic domains.

About the Author

Andreas Musolff is Director of Research at the University of East Anglia, UK.