Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates About Europe

Andreas Musolff provides an analysis of the function of metaphor in political discourse, based on material from an extensive corpus of British and German press coverage of EU politics between 1989 and 2001. The analysis of distributions of 'metaphor scenarios' in the two corpus samples reveals differences in attitude and argumentative tendencies and leads to a refinement of cognitive metaphor theory. The ethical dimension of metaphor in politics is further explored with reference to Hobbes' Leviathan.