Title: Attack metaphors of the welfare state and austerity across the British press, 2008–2015
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2020, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 21-48
Extent
21-48
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2020-1-2
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/142600
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This paper analyses a group of metaphors conceptualising the welfare state as a participant in the ATTACK scenario, as well as several related metaphors involving the use of force, in a corpus of British newspaper articles published between 2008 and April 2015. The analysis draws on a point of convergence between Discourse-Historical Approach and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, focusing on the argumentative functions of these metaphors. The paper finds that these particular metaphors are attested predominantly in the left-leaning newspapers. As a predication strategy with a coercive effect, they typically work to axiologically and emotionally undermine the austerity policies of the Coalition government.
References
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[2] Cameron, Lynne (2003) Metaphor in Educational Discourse. London: Continuum.
[3] Cap, Piotr (2006) Legitimisation in Political Discourse: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.
[4] Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[5] Chilton, Paul (1996) Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. New York: Peter Lang.
[6] Chovanec, Jan, and Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna (2017) (eds) Representing the Other in European Media Discourses. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[7] Coulson, Seana (2001) Semantic Leaps. Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[8] Curtice, John (1999) Is the Sun shining on Tony Blair? The electoral influence of British newspapers. The International Journal of Press/Politics 2(2), 9–26. | DOI 10.1177/1081180X97002002003
[9] Daguerre, Anne, and Etherington, David (2014) Welfare Reform in the UK under the Conservative-led Coalition Government: Ruptures and Continuities (Working Paper). Economic Social and Research Council and Middlesex University. Retrieved from http://workfare.org.uk/pages/resources
[10] Esping-Andersen, Gøsta (1990) Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[11] Evans, Vyvyan (2013) Metaphor, lexical concepts, and figurative meaning construction. Journal of Cognitive Semantics 5(1-2), 73–107.
[12] Fabiszak, Małgorzata (2007) A Conceptual Metaphor Approach to War Discourse and its Implications. [Electronic version]. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10593/510
[13] Fairclough, Norman (1989) Language and Power. London and New York: Longman.
[14] Garland, David (2015) The Welfare State. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[15] Goatly, Andrew (2007) Washing the Brain. Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[16] Hart, Christopher (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science. New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[17] Haser, Verena (2005) Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyer.
[18] Hood, Andrew, and Phillips, David (2015, 28 January) Substantial cuts made, but biggest changes to the benefit system yet to come. Retrieved from https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7541 Accessed on 15 May 2018
[19] Jones, Margaret, and Lowe, Rodney (2002) From Beveridge to Blair. The first fifty years of Britain's welfare state 1948–1998. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
[20] KhosraviNik, Majid (2014) Immigration discourses and critical discourse analysis: dynamics of world events and immigration representations in the British press. In: Hart, Christopher, and Cap, Piotr (eds.) Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 501–520.
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[22] Kilgarriff, Adam, Baisa, Vít, Bušta, Jan, Jakubíček, Miloš, Kovář, Vojtěch, Michelfeit, Jan, Rychlý, Pavel, and Suchomel, Vít (2014) The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography (1), 7–36. https://www.sketchengine.co.uk | DOI 10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9
[23] Koller, Veronika (2004) Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[24] Kövecses, Zoltan (2017) Levels of metaphor. Cognitive Linguistics 28(2), 321–347 | DOI 10.1515/cog-2016-0052
[25] Krzyżanowski, Michał, Triandafyllidou, Anna, and Wodak, Ruth (2009) Introduction. In Triandafyllidou, Anna, Wodak, Ruth, and Krzyżanowski, Michał (eds.) The European Public Sphere and the Media. Europe in Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–12.
[26] Lakoff, George (1991) Metaphor and war: the metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies 2(1), 59–72.
[27] Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[28] Lakoff, George, Espenson, Jane, and Schwartz, Alan (1991) Master metaphor list: 2nd draft copy. Technical report, University of California at Berkeley. Retrieved from http://araw.mede.uic.edu/~alansz/metaphor/METAPHORLIST.pdf Accessed on 15 May 2018
[29] Lu, Louis Wei-Lun, and Ahrens, Kathleen (2008) Ideological influence on building metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches. Discourse & Society 19(3), 383–408. | DOI 10.1177/0957926508088966
[30] Media Reform Coalition (2015, 12 November). Who owns the UK media? Retrieved from http://www.mediareform.org.uk/media-ownership/who-owns-the-uk-media Accessed on 15 May 2018
[31] Musolff, Andreas (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[32] Musolff, Andreas (2016) Political Metaphor Analysis. Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.
[33] Paprota, Małgorzata (2018). Not the party of the welfare state: The boundaries of the concept of the welfare state in the construction of political identities across the British press. Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literatures 42(1), 46–65.
[34] Partington, Alan (2017) Evaluative clash, evaluative cohesion and how we actually read evaluation in texts. Journal of Pragmatics 117, 190–203. | DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.06.008
[35] Reeves, Aaron, McKee, Martin, Stuckler, David (2015) 'It's The Sun Wot Won It': Evidence of media influence on political attitudes and voting from a UK quasi-natural experiment. Social Science Research 56, 44–57 DOI 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.11.002 |
[36] Reisigl, Martin (2014) Argumentation analysis and the discourse-historical approach: a methodological framework. In Hart, Christopher, and Cap, Piotr (eds.) Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 47–96.
[37] Reisigl, Martin, and Wodak, Ruth (2001) Discourse and discrimination. London: Routledge.
[38] Reisigl, Martin, and Wodak, Ruth (2016) The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In Wodak, Ruth, and Meyer, Michael. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. London: Sage, 23–61.
[39] Semino, Elena (2008) Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: University Press.
[40] Semino, Elena, Demjén, Zsófia, and Demmen, Jane (2018) An integrated approach to metaphor and framing in cognition, discourse, and practice, with an application to metaphors for cancer. Applied Linguistics 39(5), 625–645, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amw028 | DOI 10.1093/applin/amw028
[41] Sopory, Pradeep, and Price Dillard, James (2002) The Persuasive Effects of Metaphor: A Meta-Analysis. Human Communication Research 28(3), 382–419. | DOI 10.1111/j.1468-2958.2002.tb00813.x
[42] Steen, Gerard J., Dorst, Aletta G., Herrmann, J. Berenike, Kaal, Anna A., Krennmayr, Tina, Pasma, Trijntje (2010) A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification. From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[43] Sullivan, Karen (2017) Conceptual metaphor. In Dancygier, Barbara (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 385-406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[44] Steen, Gerard. J., Reijnierse, W. Gudrun, and Burgers, Christian (2014) When do natural language metaphors influence reasoning? A follow-up study to Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2013). PLoS ONE, 9(12), e113536. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0113536 |
[45] Thibodeau, Paul H., and Boroditsky, Lena (2011) Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS ONE, 6(2), e16782. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0016782 |
[46] Thibodeau, Paul H., and Boroditsky, Lena (2013) Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning. PLoS ONE, 8(1), e52961. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0052961 |
[47] Twardzisz, Piotr (2013) The Language of Interstate Relations: In Search of Personification. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[48] Underhill, James W (2003) The switch: Metaphorical representation of the war in Iraq from September 2002 – May 2003. Metaphorik.de 05, 135–165.
[49] Williams, Steve, and Scott, Peter (eds.) (2016) Employment relations under the Coalition government: The UK experience, 2010–2015. Abingdon: Routledge.
[50] Wintour, Patrick (2013, 1 April) The day Britain changes: welfare reforms and coalition cuts take effect. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/mar/31/liberal-conservative-coalition-conservatives. Accessed on 15 May 2018
[51] Wodak, Ruth (2001) The Discourse-Historical Approach. In Wodak, Ruth, and Meyer, Michael (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 63–94.
[52] Žagar, Igor (2010) Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis. Łódź Papers in Pragmatics 6(1), 3–27. DOI 10.2478/v10016-010-0002-1 |