Chapter Three
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possibilities for the creation of metaphors that highlight social or political
detachment.
Cosmic analogies with reference to politicians are by no means new.
The UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, revealed his concerns after a
poll showed that 82 per cent of under 16s thought politicians did not care
about their opinions: “I remember as a teenager looking at politicians on
the television, like teenagers now look at me on the television, and
thinking that politicians were a different species from a different planet”
(Dearden 2014). Yet, owing to the current climate of globalization, global
communication channels and the cult of individualism, the argument that
“we are living with nineteenth and twentieth century government
structures for twenty-first century problems” (Sachs 2007) seems well-
grounded. Political structures as such enable the detachment of those in
positions of power and undermine belief in democracy; election turnout
figures explicitly manifest such high levels of distrust of public servants.
Cognitive semantic research in the field of political
discourse
There has been a growth of interest in the application of CMT analyses in
discourse studies. Abundant research has been conducted into the most
prevalent conceptual metaphors, such as: POLITICS IS WAR, POLITICS IS
SPORT, POLITICS IS ART with entailments such as POLITICIANS ARE
WARRIORS/ATHLETES/ACTORS etc. Studies encompass investigations of
conceptual metaphors in specific types of discourse, concentrate on
metaphors in politics as tools for framing events, and/or seek to unveil
applications of metaphor for manipulative purposes. George Lakoff, in a
host of publications, the most influential of which include: Philosophy In
The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
(with Mark Johnson in 1999), Moral Politics: How Liberals and
Conservatives Think (2002), Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's
Most Important Idea (2006) provides a model for researchers willing to
disguise ideological framing practices.
The crucial role of conceptual metaphor in (political) discourse has
also been recognised in the trend within CDA which advocates an
interdisciplinary approach to the analyses of meaning construction in
discourse with a special emphasis on the methodological integration of
CDA and CL. Successful applications of the tools developed by cognitive
semanticists in a host of studies attest its validity and place among a range
of other methods for the analysis of discursive practices and their
implications. The fusion of the methodologies of Cognitive Linguistics