Until a century ago, a metaphor was just a mere figure of speech, but since the development of discourse analysis a metaphor has become more than merely incidental to the content of the arguments or findings. Students and scholars in political studies know the importance of metaphors in electoral and policy-related politics, coming across metaphors that are, knowingly or unknowingly, influencing our perception of politics. This book is the first to develop new methodological approaches to understand and analyse the use of metaphor in political science and international relations. It does this by: Combining theory with case studies in order to advance substantive work in politics and international relations that focuses on metaphor Expands the range of empirical case studies that employ this category descriptively and also in explanatory logic Advances research that investigates the role of metaphor in empirical and discourse-based methodologies, thus building on results from other disciplines, notably linguistics and hermeneutic philosophy. This innovative study will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, international relations and communication studies.

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.

The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade, to shape expectations, to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of conceptual metaphors in discourse to show how political metaphors function in the real world. It starts from the finding that the same conceptual domains are used to characterize politics, political entities and political issues. Yet, the specific metaphors used to describe these conceptual domains often change. This book explores some of the reasons for this variation, including features of political leaders (e.g., their age and gender), countries, and other sociopolitical circumstances. This perspective yields a better understanding of the role(s) of metaphors in political discourse.

This book explores the cognitively-oriented approach to metaphor studies, comparing it critically to other contemporary paradigms of metaphor in meaning. It incorporates cutting edge empirical data. In both semantics and cognitive linguistics, metaphor has gained central status over the past decades, chiefly on account of Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, which has become a standard point of reference. Rather than advocating a 'pick and mix' combination of cognitive attitudes with theory and data from other paradigms, the book argues for the methodologically reflective comparison of theory traditions and acknowledgement of their strengths and weaknesses. This critical reflection on metaphor is an essential read for students of metaphor at an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level. Each chapter outlines areas for further reading and research, and the book is built around data drawn from a multilingual research corpus of metaphors compiled from existing research, other corpora and internet data.

This book analyzes the rhetoric of speeches by major British or American politicians and shows how metaphor is used systematically to create political myths of monsters, villains and heroes. Metaphors are shown to interact with other figures of speech to communicate subliminal meanings by drawing on the unconscious emotional association of words.

Distinguished researchers from around the world examine the interplay between gender and metaphor in political language in Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and Singapore. They draw on a wide variety of corpus data to determine to what extent metaphors used by women in political power differ with, or remain the same as that of men. They also examine what effect metaphor use has on women's power in the political arena. This wide-ranging collection of language-based studies will interest students and researchers in discourse analysis, political communication, gender studies, journalism, and media studies.

Scholars in many of the disciplines surrounding politics explicitly utilize either a narrative perspective or a metaphor perspective (though rarely the two in combination) to analyze issues -- theoretical and practical, domestic and international -- in the broad field of politics. Among the topics they have studied are: competing metaphors for the state or nation which have been coined over the centuries in diverse cultures; the frequency with which communal and international conflicts are generated, at least in part, by the clashing religious and historical narratives held by opposing groups; the cognitive short-cuts employing metaphor by which citizens make sense of politics; the need for political candidates to project a convincing self-narrative; the extent to which the metaphors used to formulate social issues determine the policies which will be developed to resolve them; the failure of narratives around the security of the nation to take account of the individual experiences of women and children. This volume is the first in which eminent scholars from disciplines as diverse as social psychology, anthropology, political theory, international relations, feminist political science, and media studies, have sought to integrate the narrative and the metaphor perspectives on politics. It will appeal to any scholar interested in the many ways in which narrative and metaphor function in combination as cognitive and rhetorical instruments in discourse around politics.