Images and roles of the European Union in the climate change debate

The aim of this chapter is to understand how the ideas of unity and leadership are conveyed linguistically by the members of the European Parliament (MEP)’s interventions. Using the cognitive metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson I argue that the analysis of conceptual metaphors will show how MEPs perceive the EU and its role in the climate change discussions. The corpus used in this analysis is composed of two debates that took place at the European Parliament, respectively before and after the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), in December 2009.