Article published in:
Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction: Multimodal and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Manuela Romano and Maria Dolores Porto
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 262] 2016
► pp. 79–108

The persuasive (and manipulative) power of metaphor in ‘austerity’ discourse

A corpus-based analysis of embodied and moral metaphors of austerity in the Portuguese press

| Catholic University of Portugal
This chapter analyses the persuasive power of metaphors used in the Portuguese press to justify the implementation of harsh austerity policies. The analysis relies on a corpus of news and opinion articles published in June-July 2011, after the entry of the Troika, and May 2013, when protests against the austerity policies intensified. The study adopts a socio-cognitive view of language following the promising convergence between Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, and the corpus-based and critical discourse-based approach to conceptual metaphor. Using the target-domain method for corpus-based metaphor identification, 1,151 austerity-related metaphorical expressions associated with eight target lexemes were gathered, which include great chain of being, image schemas, and event/action metaphors. The analysis reveals the persuasive and manipulative force of certain specific metaphors, such as obesity/diet, indebted family, good student, and sacrifice. These socially-embodied metaphors are grounding in moral cultural models and serve ideological, emotional and moral purposes.
Keywords: Cognitive Linguistics, conceptual metaphor, corpus-based analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, embodiment, ideology, morality, persuasion, political and economic discourse, situatedness
Published online: 31 March 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.262.04soa
References
Bauman, Zygmunt
2006 Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Bernárdez, Enrique
2008 “Collective Cognition and Individual Activity: Variation, Language and Culture.” In Body, Language, and Mind. Volume 2. Sociocultural Situatedness, ed. by Roslyn M. Frank, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez, 137–166. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Blyth, Mark
2013 Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2005 Politicians and Rhetoric. The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Politicians and Rhetoric. The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 “What is the Purpose of Metaphor in Political Discourse? An Answer from Critical Metaphor Analysis.” In Comunicação Política e Económica. Dimensões Cognitivas e Discursivas, ed. by Augusto Soares da Silva, Cândido Martins, Luísa Magalhães, and Miguel Gonçalves, 69–87. Braga: Aletheia, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Católica Portuguesa.Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul
1996 Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dirven, René, Frank Polzenhagen and Hans-Georg Wolf
2007 “Cognitive Linguistics, Ideology, and Critical Discourse Analysis.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, 1222–1240. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
2003 Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Frank, Roslyn M., René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez
(eds) 2008 Body, Language, and Mind. Volume 2. Sociocultural Situatedness. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk
2010 Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens
(eds) 2007 The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hampe, Beate
(ed) 2005 From Perception to Meaning. Image schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hart, Christopher
2010 Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
2015 “Discourse.” In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Ewa 
Dabrowska and Dagmar Divjak, 322–346. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Herrera-Soler, Honesto and Michael White
(eds) 2012 Metaphor and Mills. Figurative Language in Business and Economics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Mark
1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Koller, Veronika
2004 Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 “Socio-cognitive Approaches to Corporate Discourse.” In Comunicação Política e Económica. Dimensões Cognitivas e Discursivas, ed. by Augusto Soares da Silva, Cândido Martins, Luísa Magalhães and Miguel Gonçalves, 89–103. Braga: Aletheia, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Católica Portuguesa.Google Scholar
2014 “Cognitive Linguistics and Ideology.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Jeanette Littlemore and John R. Taylor, 234–252. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltán
2002 Metaphor. A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Krugman, Paul
2010 “Myths of Austerity.” The New York Times, July 1. http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/07​/02​/opinion​/02krugman​.html​?ref​=paulkrugmanGoogle Scholar
2011 “When Austerity Fails.” The New York Times, May 22. http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2011​/05​/23​/opinion​/23krugman​.html​?ref​=paulkrugmanGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George
1993 “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony, 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1996 Moral Politics. How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2004 Don’t Think of Elephant! Know your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives. New York: Chelsea Green.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Turner
1989 More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lovejoy, Arthur O
1936 The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Moreno Lara, María Angeles
2008 La metáfora en el lenguaje político de la prensa americana. Modelos cognitivos y formación de significado. Granada: Comares.Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas
2004 Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas and Jorg Zinken
(eds) 2009 Metaphor and Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Oakley, Todd
2007 “Image Schemas.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, 214–235. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Peña Cervel, Sandra
2003 Topology and Cognition: What Image Schemas Reveal about the Metaphorical Language of Emotions. München: Lincom.Google Scholar
Pishwa, Hanna
(ed) 2009 Language and Social Cognition. Expression of the Social Mind. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rojo López, Ana María and María Ángeles Orts Llopis
2010 “Metaphorical Pattern Analysis in Financial Texts: Framing the Crisis in Positive or Negative Metaphorical Terms.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3300–3313. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sardinha, Tony Berber
2011 “Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics.” Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada 11 (2): 329–360. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Semino, Elena
2008 Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Soares da Silva, Augusto
2003 “Image Schemas and Category Coherence: The Case of the Portuguese Verb Deixar.” In Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics, ed. by Hubert 
Cuyckens, René Dirven and John R. Taylor, 281–322. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006 O Mundo dos Sentidos em Português: Polissemia, Semântica e Cognição [The World of Senses in Portuguese: Semantic Polysemy and Cognition]. Coimbra: Almedina.Google Scholar
2013a “O que sabemos sobre a crise económica, pela metáfora. Conceptualizações metafóricas da crise na imprensa portuguesa [What we know about the economic crisis through metaphor. Metaphorical conceptualizations of the crisis in the Portuguese press].” Revista Media & Jornalismo 23 (1): 11–34.Google Scholar
2013b “Introdução. Comunicação política e económica: cognição e discurso [Introduction. Political and economic communication: cognition and discourse].” In Comunicação Política e Económica. Dimensões cognitivas e discursivas [Political and Economic Communication. Cognitive and Discursive Dimensions], ed. by Augusto Soares da Silva, Cândido Martins, Luísa Magalhães, and Miguel Gonçalves, 1–19. Braga: Aletheia, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Católica Portuguesa.Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard J
2011 “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor – Now New and Improved!” Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1): 26–64. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 “The Cognitive-Linguistic Revolution in Metaphor Studies.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Jeanette Littlemore, and John R. Taylor, 117–142. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol
2006 “Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy.” In Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, ed. by Anatol Stefanowitsch, and Stephan Th. Gries, 1–16. Berlin/NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Th. Gries
2006 Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun
2006 “Discourse and Manipulation.” Discourse and Society 17 (3): 359–383. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vereza, Solange Coelho
2007 “Metáfora e argumentação: Uma abordagem cognitivo-discursiva [Metaphor and argumentation: A cognitive-discursive approach].” Linguagem em (Dis)curso 7 (3): 487–506.Google Scholar
2013 “Discourse, Cognition and Figurative Language: Exploring Metaphors in Political Editorials.” In Comunicação Política e Económica. Dimensões Cognitivas e Discursivas, ed. by Augusto Soares da Silva, Cândido Martins, Luísa Magalhães, and Miguel Gonçalves, 395–406. Braga: Aletheia, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Católica Portuguesa.Google Scholar
Zlatev, Jordan, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen
(eds) 2008 The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

No author info given
2022.  In Modeling Irony [Figurative Thought and Language, 12], Crossref logo
Alarcón Hernández, Paola, Díaz Larenas, Claudio & Vásquez Bustos, Víctor
2019. Un análisis de columnas de opinión desde la metáfora conceptual. Signo y Pensamiento 37:73 Crossref logo
Romano, Manuela & M Dolores Porto
2018. ‘The tide, change, nobody can stop it’: Metaphor for social action. Discourse & Society 29:6 ► pp. 655 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 may 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.