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Book review
Metaphor and Political Discour:Analogical Reasoning in Debates About Europe by Andreas Musolff,Palgrave Macmillan,Houndmills,Basingstoke,2004,viii +211pp.,hb.
Integrating a cognitive-mantic approach to metaphor with pragmatic,discour-analytic and axiological insights,Musolff’s book stands out as an extremely interesting and valuable study.In a n,it mirrors an increasingly popular tendency among established theorists of metaphor to pursue a metaphor-bad,cognitive analysis of political discour,a trend best visible from the many minal works by George Lakoff (cf.Lakoff,1992,1996,2003,etc.).But although Musolff’s study might be drawing on the in terms of inspiration,it offers its own,coherent apparatus to deal with a vast corpus of real-world linguistic and political data.The result is an elegant refinement of cognitive metaphor theory,involving an impressive range of conceptual,mantic,rhetorical,historical and ethical domains.
Musolff’s book gives a thorough analysis of metaphorical scenarios underlying the public discour on European integration in two countries:the UK and Germany.It eks to explain the esnce of the difference in attitudes to the conception of unified Europe,a discrepancy that has come to be conventionally,albeit superficially,understood in terms of the clash of euro-scepticism (British)with euro-enthusiasm (German).In his analysis Musolff us two bilingual,English–German corpora.The first one (smaller)has been collected as part of the 1989–2001British–German rearch project on ‘‘Attitudes towards Europe’’,and the cond (bigger yet less theme-specific)aims at reflecting the EU-related discour as a whole.
The book consists of nine chapters.After a short introduction in Chapter One,Musolff devotes Chapter Two to a general account of the EU metaphors,most of which draw on the source domain of FAMILY-related concepts originally described by Lakoff (1996).The chapter starts with a preliminary discussion of how to identify metaphors in collections of linguistic data and what to count as metaphors.In his respon to the questions Musolff subscribes to Kovecs’s (2002)distinction between individual,supra-and subindividual levels of metaphor analysis.This distinction,Musolff claims,promis the most successful elucidation of metaphorical relationships occurring in public discour.As evidence,he prents a plausible numerical account of instantiations of conceptual mappings grouped into domains.Reporting on Eurometa I ,a pilot corpus of the ‘‘Attitudes towards Europe’’project,he distinguishes between 12basic source domains (such as LOVE-MARRIAGE-
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Book review461 FAMILY,LIFE-HEALTH-STRENGTH,etc.),followed in description by the number of passages in which particular conceptual mappings occur,and lastly,by the number of words involved in the instantiations of the mappings in British and German samples.This overview,Musolff concludes,proves that from the perspective of all of the EU discour and the discour of integration in particular the most universal explanatory power is available from the study of the FAMILY source domain,especially if the latter is analyzed in combination with the STATE IS A PERSON conceptual mapping.But of cour,as can be en from the later chapters in Musolff’s book,when it comes to the description of many specific areas of political argumentation,debating,etc.),other configurations may also need to be accounted for,on top of the primary analysis of the FAMILY-bad mappings.
The same Eurometa I corpus is referred to in Chapter Three,in which Musolff turns to the issue of political argument.Investigating metaphors derived from the most productive PATH-MOVEMENT-JO
URNEY source domain,he shows that‘specific political attitudes and conclusions are argued by way of analogy at the level of scenarios of MODES OF TRA VEL’(59).Conquently,differences in attitudes are mostly construed in terms of the differences in such aspects as efficiency of a given mode of transport,punctuality, coordinated movement and speed or delaying effects of obstacles on the path.Musolff’s conclusion from this part is that,given the salience of the JOURNEY source domain mappings in public discour,coupled by the immen size of the domain as such,it ems reasonable to postulate an extension of the cognitive theory of metaphor to include its argumentative dimension.This theoretical postulate is further elaborated in Chapter Four where Musoff introduces and comments on the methodological workability of two much bigger,independently asmbled corpora–the British COBUILD‘‘Bank of English’’and the German‘‘COSMAS’’–who data are arguably able to reflect the discour of EU politics in general.
Drawing on the henceforth extended language data,the revid conceptual-mantic-argumentative model is successfully tested in Chapter Five.This part of the book provides also the main body of evidence for the cross-national,British–German comparison.The analysis utilizes primarily the mappings that involve the LIFE-BODY-HEALTH source domain which is projected onto such target domains as STATE,STATE INSTITUTIONS, UNION,CONTROL,etc.Among the most interesting exa
mples discusd by Musolff is definitely one that derives from the ECONOMY IS HEALTH mapping,a relation which prompts conceptualizations of a given EU country in terms of either a‘healthy person’or a ‘sick person’.In his critical discussion of such conceptualizations,Musolff shows how arbitrary,time-and culture-dependent they could be and,conquently,how enticing and yet difficult it is to u them to judge(conflicting)attitudes.Specifically,Musolff describes how the phra sick man of Europe,originally coined by the German media to apply to the poorly operating British economy of the early1970s,was recently picked up by the British press to account for the(negative)economic conquences of the German involvement in the process of European integration.The fact that the British media pasd the stigma label onto Germany is,Musolff argues,hardly a reflection of the British sceptical attitude toward the integration as such,nor does it do justice to the allegedly poor state of the German economy in1999–2001.Much rather,it results from the earlier stigmatization which was poignantly remembered by the British.Musolff’s conclusion is that in view of such cas
any measurement of attitudes salient in linguistic expressions which takes place via analysis of the metaphorical mappings underlying them must necessarily involve diachronic or historical considerations.And,unsurprisingly enough,it is the next chapter (Chapter Six)that takes a look at the issue of the historical dimension of metaphor evolution.The question that informs this part is whether
metaphors ‘evolve’;in the n of,first,same metaphorical scenarios changing over years in the degree of political relevance and cond,new conceptual mappings being created to complement the principal scenario.Analyzing the evolution of the CONSTRUCTION OF COMMON HOUSE scenario as applied to the different stages of European integration,Musolff shows how the evolving political situation motivates the emergence of new,optimistic (e.g.PUTTING ON A NEW ROOF)or pessimistic (CHAOS ON THE EU BUILDING SITE)sub-scenarios.Abandoning the corpus-related considerations,Musolff returns in the final parts of the book (Chapters Seven,Eight and Nine)to the issue of the socio-cognitive power of metaphor.In addition to discussing individual examples of metaphor negotiation (Chapter Seven),he reinterprets the treatment of metaphor by Hobbes in the ‘‘Leviathan’’(Chapter Eight),and the latter conquently inspires a brief discussion of the ethical dimension of ‘deceptive’metaphor in Chapter Nine.The most interesting points raid by Musolff em to reach far beyond the domain of the EU discour.It is argued,with good reason,that the analogical relationship of source and target concepts involves not only the transfer of mantic structures but also of emotive and evaluative aspects as integral parts of emingly lf-evident conclusions.And ‘insofar as the conclusions are underwritten
[...]mainly by presuppod aspects of [...]everyday experience rather than by independently proven f
acts,they are open to [...]criticism that their persuasiveness is bad on fal,deceptive analogy’(173)—as was plausibly suggested by Hobbes.Indeed,this last obrvation well accounts for the German ‘default critique’of the British Conrvative Michael Howard who pleaded,in good faith,in favor of the ‘slow movement’towards EU integration.It is also an example of the elegantly maintained balance that characterizes Musolff’s book in terms of the distribution of methodological and critical findings.In addition to being an undeniable contribution to the social,pragmatic and cognitive theories of metaphor,it is clearly capable of explaining,in a vivid and entertaining manner,a multitude of ca-study aspects of public discour and of the EU discour in particular.
References
Kovecs,Zoltan,2002.Metaphor:A Practical Introduction.Oxford University Press,Oxford.
Lakoff,George,1992.Metaphor and war:the metaphor system ud to justify the war in the Gulf.In:Putz,M.
(Ed.),Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution:Studies in Honour of Rene Dirven.Benjamins,Amsterdam/Philadelphia,pp.463–481.
苗族刺绣
热爱家乡Lakoff,George,1996.Moral Politics:What Conrvatives Know That Liberals Don’t.University of Chicago
Press,Chicago.
Lakoff,George,2003.Metaphor and War,Again.www.alternet/story/15414.Posted March 18,2003.
Accesd March 5,2005.
Piotr Cap (1970)is associate professor and head of the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Ło
´dz ´,Poland.He has been guest rearcher at veral European and American institutions,including UC Berkeley,the
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Book review463
University of Birmingham and the University of Munich.His interests are primarily in linguistic pragmatics, political rhetoric and methodology of linguistics.His major book publications include Explorations in Political Discour(Peter Lang Verlag,2002)and Analytic Determinism of the Study of Persuasive Discour(University ofŁo´dz´Press,2003).Piotr Cap is chair of the international conference New Developments in Linguistic Pragmatics(held biannually inŁo´dz´)and editor-in-chief of the journalŁo´dz´Papers in Pragmatics(LPP, published annually by the University ofŁo´dz´Press).
Piotr Cap*
Department of Pragmatics并列式结构
Institute of English
University ofŁo´dz´Al.Kos´ciuszki65
90-514Ło´dz´,Poland
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*Tel.+48426655220;fax:+48426655220
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E-mail address:strus_
宝马骄车/strus_pl/piotr_cap
3March2005
