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Part of
Cultural Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies
Edited by Monika Reif and Frank Polzenhagen
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 103] 2023
► pp. 15–35

Culture-specific variation in interpretations of nations as bodies metaphors by English and German L1 speakers

| University of East Anglia

One of the key-metaphor complexes in conceptualizing national identity is that of the nation as a body or a person. Nation -embodiment and -personalization have had a long conceptual history and still figure prominently in present-day political discourse. However, the socio-psychological impact of these metaphors is still in question: does the occurrence of embodied and personalized nation-depictions in public discourse mean that recipients understand and interpret international relations in terms of inter-body or inter-personal relationships?

New empirical evidence from a metaphor interpretation survey conducted in 30 countries suggest that such conceptualizations do indeed occur and lead to creative elaboration and inter-metaphor blendings. Moreover, it can be shown that the elicited metaphor interpretations relate to culture-specific discourse traditions. The chapter compares data from the English and German L1 survey samples and discusses their implications for the analysis of metaphor understanding.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor, culture, pragmatics, variation, universal vs. relative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The ubiquity of metaphor variation
  • 3.Variation in metaphor corpora
    • 3.1The English L1 sample
    • 3.2The German L1 sample
  • 4.Comparison
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.01mus
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