Journey as A Domain in Metaphorical Mappings in Eu

Journey as A Domain in Metaphorical Mappings in Eu

SULJKANOVIC, Dženita

Key words: conceptual metaphor, metaphorical mappings, political discourse, conventionality of metaphors, metaphorical scenarios ABSTRACT This presentation will try to bring political discourse of EU to a closer inspection on frequency of metaphor usage, in particular the ones with journey as a domain. Since metaphors are considered to be mostly the part of literature, it is a general belief that they are not commonly used in politics or political discourse. Among so many metaphor constructions and conventionalized metaphor phrases, it is quite of an interest to see how often do we hear politicians use metaphors in their speeches. However, since politicians tend to get votes and support from the masses, they do use these oratorical ways of expressing their beliefs and as such they have to use phrases familiar to people. Exploring political speeches, online magazines and political journals, a substantial corpus of metaphors is collected and thus used to demonstrate the frequency of this part of speech in both English and Bosnian. Moreover, metaphors of journey of both languages fall under two categories, which are the following: vehicle specific and general walking journey scenario, which is thus proven that metaphors are conventionalized and used in everyday language. Through analysis of these findings, it is shown that general walking journey scenarios are much more standardized in language and it is not even considered to be unusual to find a metaphor in politics. On the other hand, vehicle specific journey metaphors have still a long way to go. Finally, the analysis of metaphors of journey will be thoroughly presented in this paper in order to demonstrate conventionality of metaphors in political discourse of EU in English and Bosnian.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1758