Importance Of Metaphor In Political Discourse

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IDEOLOGY PROMOTION VIA POLITICAL MYTHS A Cognitive Critical Study of Political Discourse in the UK and the Republic of Croatia Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864) 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Defining fundamental terms There is no type of discourse in which the connection between language and power and the creation of social inequality is as obvious as in political discourse. In fact, politics affect people’s cognition by constructing and changing the image of the world around them (social reality). This means that “language is constitutive of reality, and that political realities are very much linguistic constructs”. (Townson, 1992:32) Applying an interdisciplinary approach, which relies on the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Cognitive Linguistics (CL), especially the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) and the Theory of Ideographs (TI), this dissertation seeks to explain the discursive …show more content…

In the linguistic sense, metaphor is an experiential and cognitive process and not a stylistic figure. According to Cognitive Metaphor Theory, source domains (SD) originate from the embodied experience (the Grounding Hypothesis) and affect the meaning of the target domains (TD). In addition, Lakoff (1993) defines a conceptual metaphor as a one-way mapping across cognitive domains, where structures from a source domain are partially mapped onto target domains. Actually, there are ontological correspondences between the components of the source domains and the components of the target domains. This does not mean that the structures are being copied from SD to TD, but the whole sets of knowledge are being transferred from the source domain into the target