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Title:
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Metaphor in Political and Economic Texts
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Author:
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Zouhair Maalej
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Manouba
, Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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1990
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Pragmatics
Cognitive Science
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Fathi Dali
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Abstract:
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The dissertation is written as a counterargument to two important dominant myths about metaphor: (i) that metaphor is a figure of speech having a stylistic value, and (ii) that literature is the only valuable recruiting ground for metaphor. To react again st this, the cognitive linguistics framework (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) is defended, whereby metaphor is a matter of thought pervading our conceptual system. The data adduced to defend the cognitive status of metaphor are politics and economics discourses. The politics part investigates metaphoric discourse through major political writings (Hobbes' Leviathan, Paine's Rights of Man, Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Mill's On Liberty) and inaugural addresses of American presidents (Rooseve lt, Nixon, Reagan, Bush) and one British Prime Minister (Lloyd George). The study isolates the various cognitive domains used to cognize politics, explaining the choice of metaphor by its entailments. In the economics part, in contrast, it is argued after Boyd (1979) that economics discourse includes "theory-constitutive metaphors," which make up models of economic speech or the metaphors that economics lives by. Apart from economics textbooks, this part investigates Time and Newsweek for the most common metaphors. The gist of the dissertation is that the politics metaphors' cognitive semantic domains are more open-ended than their economics counterparts. The dissertation offers, apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion, a review of the literature, including semantic theories of metaphor (selection restriction violation view, simile view, interaction view, and substitution view), pragmatic theories of metaphor (Searle, Grice, Sperber and Wilson), and Lakoff and Johnson's experiential cognitive theory of metaphor.
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