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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:3 (2019) ► pp.371–392

“Leftie snowflakes” and other metaphtonymies in the British political discourse

ORCID logo | Maria Curie-Skłodowska University
The present paper deals with the use of deliberate metaphors in the political discourse. The potential of dehumanising metaphors to create derogatory descriptions used to disparage one’s political opponents is analysed. Also, metaphorical descriptions prove to be very productive in creating polysemy in previously monosemous items which are used in a new capacity in order to create an effect of novelty and surprise. This function appears especially useful in the language of politics in general, and the language of British politics in particular. The paper is maintained within the methodological framework of cognitive linguistics, focusing on the theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, dehumanising metaphor, political language, political slurs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conceptual metaphor and metonymy
  • 3.Dehumanizing metaphors
  • 4.Methodology and data
  • 5.+weak people are liquid substances+
    • Case 1.Wet
    • Case 2.Slug
    • Case 3.Toad
    • Case 4.Melt
    • Case 5.Snowflake
  • 6.Other examples
  • 7.Summary and prospects of further research
  • Note
  • Dictionaries
  • Corpus
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17073.pra
References (42)
Dictionaries
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (https://​ahdictionary​.com/)
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged. 2014. 12th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers
English Oxford Living Dictionaries (https://​en​.oxforddictionaries​.com/)
PWN Dictionary of Polish Language (https://​sjp​.pwn​.pl/)
Corpus
NoW (News on the Web) corpus (https://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/now/)
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