Home » eJournal

Meadows (2007) Distancing and Showing Solidarity via Metaphor and Metonymy in Political Discourse: A critical study of American statements on Iraq during the years 2004-2005

Distancing and Showing Solidarity via Metaphor and Metonymy in Political Discourse: A critical study of American statements on Iraq during the years 2004-2005

Bryan Meadows, University of Arizona, USA

Volume 1

Abstract

Following in the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis and the growing field of Critical Metaphor Analysis, this study explores the way in which the Bush administration attempts to create both distance and solidarity towards general social categories indexed by the terms Iraqi people and American people. The acts of distancing and solidarity are accomplished primarily via metaphorical and metonymical references to conceptualizations of us/them which in turn correspond to Lakoff's HERO and VILLAIN conceptual metaphors. Qualitative analysis of public statements on the Iraq conflict issued by the Bush administration during the years 2004-2005 present the following findings. The explicit identification of the enemy/other category of the Iraq conflict is supported by metaphorical and metonymic images that speak to the American cultural cognitive model. Furthermore, the study underscores the dynamic nature of categories by documenting a metaphorical transfer between the SADDAM and TERRORIST domains. Also identified in the study is the conceptual metaphor of IRAQ AS AMERICA which presents to the American audience an Iraqi version of themselves, completely outfitted with established positive characteristics of the American people category. Finally, the dynamic nature of social categories and metaphorical associations are specifically explored in terms of this emerging conceptual metaphor.

Download

Download full text of the article as PDF

(We recommend the free FoxIt PDF Viewer or Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 for better PDF experience.)

References

Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. (2003) Cross-cultural representation and ‘Otherness' in media discourse. In G. Weiss and R. Wodak (eds.), Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. pp.272-295.

Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (1999) The Discursive construction of national identities. Discourse & Society 10 (2): 149-173.

Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power. London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. and Wodak, R. (1997) Critical discourse analysis. In T. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Vol. 2. London: Sage. pp.258-286.

Gee, J. (2004) Discourse analysis: What makes it critical? In R. Rogers (ed.), An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp.19-50.

Gibbs, R. (1994) The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanks, W. (2005) Pierre Bourdieu and the practices of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 67-83.

Holquist, M. (ed.). (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Lakoff, G. (1992) Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the gulf. In M. Putz (ed.), Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution: Studies in Honor of Rene Dirven on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp.463-481.

Lakoff, G. (2003) Metaphor and war, again. Retrieved on 20 April 2007 from www.alternet.org/module/printversion/15414.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Leudar, I., Marsland, V. and Nekvapil, J. (2004) On membership categorization: ‘Us,' ‘them' and ‘doing violence' in political discourse. Discourse & Society 15 (2-3): 243-266.

Martín, J. (1997) The cultural cognitive model: A programmatic application. In A. Barcelona (ed.), Linguistica Cognitiva Aplicada al Estudio de la Lengua Inglesa y su Literatura / Cognitive Linguistics in the Study of the English Language and Literature. Monograph issue of Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa, 6:2. pp.53-63.

Philips, S. (1998) Constructing a Tongan nation-state through language ideology in the courtroom. In P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. pp.229-257.

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (eds.) (2001) Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Anti-semitism. London: Routledge.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez, F. and Díez Velasco, O. (2002) Patterns of conceptual interaction. In R. Dirven and R. Porings (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp.489-532.

Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Sandikcioglu, E. (2000) More metaphorical warfare in the Gulf: Orientalist frames in news coverage. In A. Barcelona (ed), Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp.299-320.

Santa Ana, O. (1999) ‘Like an animal I was treated': Anti-immigrant metaphor in US public discourse. Discourse & Society 10 (2): 191-224.

Taylor, J. (1995) Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Dijk, T. (1984) Prejudice in Discourse: An Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

van Dijk, T. (2001) Critical discourse analysis. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp.352-371.

White House Office of the Press Secretary (2006) Welcome to the White House. Retrieved on 1 August 2006 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/.

Wodak, R. (ed.) (1989) Language, Power, and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and Liebhart, K. (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. (A. Hirsch and R. Mitten, Trans.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (Originally published 1998).

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds.) (2001) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.

( categories: )