16. Critical analysis of creative metaphors in political speeches

Creative metaphors play, in many respects, an important role in political discourse; however, there is still a lack of categories to identify and analyse creative metaphors on a textual level. One precondition for analysing creativity in a non-literary discourse such as politics is to understand that creativity exists rather along clines and, therefore, needs to be redefined according to its context. As a consequence, this study understands creative metaphors as expressions which draw the attention to their metaphoricity by deviating from conventional ways of expressing things within a particular discourse or genre (e.g. political speeches). In addition, an analysis of the metaphor “centre of gravity” in a speech of the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer will illustrate how corpora can help us to evaluate metaphorical expressions within this framework.