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Article published In:
Corpus Approaches to Language, Thought and Communication
Edited by Wei-lun Lu, Naděžda Kudrnáčová and Laura A. Janda
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:1] 2019
► pp. 275–294
Regular articles

Conceptual metaphors and performativity in the Sunshine Policy

| Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
This paper explores the roles of the cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphor and performativity in political policy by conducting a case study on the South Korean government’s Sunshine Policy toward North Korea from 1998 to 2008. This study contends that the policy is metaphorically motivated by an Aesop’s fable, The sun and the wind, a narrative whose entailments have significant implications for the policy. It also systematically accounts for the policy’s performative characteristic, focusing on the fact that the policy makers intended to map the causal relationship of the narrative onto a real-world relationship, even though the real-world causal relationship must be based on the unknown result of the policy. Lastly, this paper discusses theoretical implications of the performativity entangled with the conceptual metaphors in the policy; the real-world concept is usually what limits the mapping possibilities, but in this case, the narrative structure of the fable determines the construal.
Keywords: the Sunshine Policy, conceptual metaphor, performativity, conceptual mapping
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The Sunshine Policy
    • 2.2Theoretical frameworks: Conceptual metaphors and performativity
  • 3.Conceptual metaphors underlying the Sunshine Policy
    • 3.1Metaphors in focus
    • 3.2Different conceptualizations in the attested discourse dataset
  • 4.Performativity in policy
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00035.kwo
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