This book discusses metaphor at work in a variety of linguistic contexts, from election leaflets to specialist scientific articles.

The contributors present a coherent collection of work on the functioning of metaphor in public discourse and related discourse areas from a broadly cognitive-linguistic background, providing a state-of-the-art overview of research on the discursive grounding of metaphor from a cognitive-linguistic perspective.

This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.

'Metaphor in Educational Discourse is a superb piece of applied linguistics research that integrates Vygotsky's theory of concepts with current work on metaphor into a coherent framework for investigating how teachers and learners negotiate figurative language in order to promote development in the classroom setting. In what is likely to become the standard for future studies in this area, Lynne Cameron meticulously demonstrates the central role of linguistic metaphors in classroom learning - designed to lead learners to a deeper understanding of complex mathematical and scientific concepts.' James P. Lantolf, Professor of Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University. This book reports research into metaphor in use with school students. The setting for the research is a UK school and the participants are around ten years old, with their first language well established but still developing concepts and understandings. Close examination of a corpus of classroom spoken discourse reveals how metaphor is employed by their teachers, not just in explaining ideas, but, in managing and mediating the activity of the classroom and the learning of the students. Particular issues discussed include: the problems of identifying metaphors in spoken discourse, the conventionalism of metaphors in the discourse of socio-cultural groups, and how a socio-cultural approach can account for systematicity in metaphor use.

Metaphor in Specialist Discourse presents multiple perspectives on metaphor use in specialist and popularized discourse contexts. Using genre and register as starting parameters for deeper exploration, and pushing the boundaries further to open up new areas and possibilities, ten independent articles investigate metaphor use across a range of specialist domains of discourse, such as biology research articles, psychological counseling, soccer commentaries, workfloor communication, and penal policy documents. Framed by two theoretical chapters, the book is a contribution to the study of metaphor use in distinct discourse settings that will be of value to linguists and metaphor scholars of different persuasions, graduate students of linguistics and related disciplines, and practitioners of specialized areas with an interest in (verbal or gestural) language use in their areas of expertise. It shows that aspects of discourse variation are the beginning of, not an afterthought to, accurate empirical metaphor studies.

This book represents a new direction at the interface between the fields of stylistics and corpus linguistics, namely the use of a corpus methodology to investigate how people's words and thoughts are presented in written narratives.

Far from being rhetorical ornaments, metaphors play a central role in public discourse, as they shape the structure of political categorisation and argumentation. Drawing on a very large bilingual corpus, this book, now in paperback, analyses the distribution of 'metaphor scenarios' in more than a decade of public discourse on European integration, elucidating differences in UK and German attitudes and argumentation. The corpus analysis leads to a refinement of cognitive metaphor theory by systematically relating conceptual, semantic and argumentation levels and incorporating the historical dimension of metaphor evolution. Finally, drawing on examples of metaphor negotiation and on a reassessment of Hobbes' concept of metaphor in Leviathan, the book highlights the ethical dimension of metaphor in politics.