Cultural Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies

politics, society and culture
discourse approaches to
Cultural Linguistics
and Critical
Discourse Studies
edited by
Monika Reif
Frank Polzenhagen
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Free University, Berlin
Volume 103
Cultural Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies
Edited by Monika Reif and Frank Polzenhagen
Cultural Linguistics and
Critical Discourse Studies
Edited by
Monika Reif
Frank Polzenhagen
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Table of contents
Introduction 1
Monika Reif & Frank Polzenhagen
Culture-specific variation in interpretations of nations as bodies metaphors
by English and German L1 speakers 15
Andreas Musolff
Conceptualising presidential elections: Competing metaphorical models, and
alternative approaches to their critical analysis 36
Olaf Jäkel
Opening the thinkgates? The discourse dynamics of migration metaphors in
online debates 52
Monika Reif
Conceptualization of goat in West African Englishes 105
Kader Baş Keškić
Cooking verbs and the cultural conceptualization of cooking processes in
Japanese 127
Natsuko Tsujimura
Wellness: A cultural linguistic analysis of the conceptualisation of health 146
Penelope Scott
Critical Cultural Linguistics (CCL): Challenging the cultural (re)production
of Otherness 170
Paola Giorgis
What can attitudes reveal about prejudices? 191
Michael B. Hinner
Index 211
Introduction
Monika Reif & Frank Polzenhagen
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU)
The present book is one of three collective volumes that grew out of the 2018
LAUD/CLIC symposium “Cultural Linguistics: Current and emerging trends in
research on language and cultural conceptualisations” held in Landau (Germany).
LAUD/CLIC 2018 was a joint conference, constituting the 38th International
LAUD Symposium and the 2nd Cultural Linguistics International Conference. The
conference was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German
Research Foundation), the Gillet Foundation (Edesheim) and the University of
Koblenz-Landau. Most of the papers in the present volume were contributions to
the theme session “Cultural Linguistics, Ideologies and Critical Discourse Stud-
ies” at this conference. The aim of this theme session was to explore common
ground between Cultural Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, primarily
(but not exclusively) from a cognitive-linguistic vantage point. In our introduc-
tion, we will sketch the rationale underlying this exploration, provide a brief
overview of the research strands involved and then situate the individual contri-
butions in the overall framework.
1. Critical (cognitive) Discourse Studies and Cultural Linguistics:

A sketch of the frameworks
The first comprehensive handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts &

Cuyckens 2007), published 15 years ago, included a chapter on “Cognitive lin-
guistics, ideology, and critical discourse analysis” (Dirven, Polzenhagen & Wolf
2007) and one on “Cognitive linguistics and cultural studies” (Dirven, Wolf &
Polzenhagen 2007). In fact, the original conception of the handbook from 2003
did not envisage to give each of these topics a chapter of its own. It was the ini-
tiative of René Dirven that both topics were covered individually, although the
cognitive-linguistic approach to these research areas was still in the early stages
of development at the time, with but a limited body of studies available along
these lines. Seen in retrospect, Dirven’s initiative had much foresight. Since then,
both research areas have been impressively thriving fields of investigation rooted
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.intro
© 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Monika Reif & Frank Polzenhagen
in or related to Cognitive Linguistics (CL), and they contributed much to the

refinement of CL theory. On the one hand, CL-oriented studies have come to be
a major, if not dominant, strand within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). On
the other hand, and in a parallel fashion, we witnessed the rapid development
of Cultural Linguistics as a genuine research paradigm strongly communicating
with CL.
CDA had had, of course, a rich history prior to the advent of CL. It emerged in
the late 1970s, as a heterogenous movement rooted in the then dominant strands
in the social sciences (e.g. Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Foucault) and, in terms of its lin-
guistic framework, mainly associated with functional approaches, in particular
Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and text linguistics. Key authors include
Fairclough (e.g. 1989, 1995), Fowler, Hodge, Kress (e.g. Fowler et al. 1979; Hodge
& Kress 1993) and Wodak (e.g. Wodak 1989). There were also socio-cognitive
approaches, most notably through the work of van Dijk (e.g. 1998). By the end of
the 1990s, this more traditional CDA had grown into an impressive research pro-
gramme, as documented in Toolan’s (2002) 4-volume reader, and it constitutes a
highly productive framework still today.
In the 1990s, the field was joined by linguists with a background in CL. Early
critical cognitive-linguistic analyses of political and media discourse were mainly
metaphor-based, against the backdrop of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) in
the Lakoff & Johnson (1980) tradition. It is not surprising that the CMT frame-
work was applied to these fields almost right from the start. First and foremost,
its key notions such as ‘highlighting-and-hiding’, the understanding of metaphor
and metonymy as fundamentally conceptual phenomena, and the related insight
of their ubiquity and systematicity both in the conceptual system and in terms of
their linguistic manifestations clearly invited a re-consideration of the fairly lim-
ited attention paid to metaphor and metonymy in traditional CDA, and, more
generally, the application of CMT to the study of ideology. Furthermore, major
CMT proponents, most prominently George Lakoff, were and still are leading
political activists in the progressive camp and thus sensitive to this field of appli-
cation. Lakoff ’s own early contributions include his analysis of framing during the
first gulf war (Lakoff 1992) and his highly influential account of family metaphors
in conservative and progressive thought in US politics presented in Moral Politics
(1996) and a series of follow-up publications (e.g., Lakoff 2004, 2006a, 2006b,
2008; see also Goatly 2007).
Critical CL approaches gained momentum in the early 2000s, and the range
of topics and discourse fields addressed from this analytic perspective broadened
significantly, covering, e.g., the representation of (im-)migration (e.g., Santa Ana
2002) and of gender as well as business discourse (e.g., Koller 2004), to name just
a few. The twin volumes by Dirven, Hawkins & Sandikcioglu (2001) and Dirven,
Introduction 3
Frank & Ilie (2001) that grew out of the 6th International Cognitive Linguistics
Conference (1999) document both important theoretical refinements of the frame-
work and various case studies. Several of these studies already foreshadow the
strong link to a cultural-linguistic perspective, which was addressed in more detail
at LAUD 2002, whose output can be found in Dirven, Frank & Pütz (2003). They
also project significant challenges of the original CMT framework that resulted in
a far-reaching revision of the notions of metaphor and metonymy in CL over the
years to come.
Several lines of development stand out in CL-oriented critical discourse stud-
ies during the last two decades, following the early phase reviewed in the hand-
book chapter mentioned above (Dirven, Polzenhagen & Wolf 2007). We will
highlight some of them since they manifest in various contributions to the present
volume.
i. While studies in the early phase were dominated by the CMT approach, the
investigations have been more and more extended to CL notions beyond
metaphor and metonymy. This development is documented and illustrated,
e.g., by Hart (2014, 2015). Relevant theoretical notions include force-dynamic
constellations, event construal, perspectivation and viewpoint placement,
and profile/base. This extension yields far more comprehensive analyses,
addressing, for instance, grammatical choices and structure as well as argu-
mentative and persuasive strategies used in texts.
ii. The notions of conceptual metaphor and metonymy themselves have been
subject to important re-considerations. These include the recognition of the
socio-cultural basis of metaphor and hence of variation across socio-cultural
groups in this realm (e.g. Kövecses 2005) and the awareness of the influence
of various dimensions of context and co-text (Kövecses 2015; Semino 2008;
Chilton 2004; Cameron 2003, 2008). Another important elaboration comes
from the insight that metaphors and metonymies are embedded in specific
scenarios in discourse; this point has been developed most prominently by
Musolff (e.g. 2006) and recent studies along these lines include Semino,
Demjén & Demmen (2018) and Koller & Ryan (2019). It also yielded a return
to the recognition of the rhetorical functions of metaphor, a perspective that
was backgrounded in the original CMT. The contributions by Jäkel, Musolff
and Reif in the present volume exemplify this refined view and analysis of
metaphor.
iii. Following and fostering the general development within CL towards usage-
based approaches, discourse-analytic studies along these lines have turned to
systematic empirical bases for their analyses, e.g. corpora of various designs
(Deignan 2005; Charteris-Black 2004). We witness this development in the
present volume: Jäkel uses a corpus of political speeches as his basis, Musolff
compiled an extensive corpus of interviews for his analysis, Reif collected
below-the-line comments from online newspaper fora.
iv. There is a growing trend of adding historical depth to critical discourse stud-
ies by taking into account the discourse history of a particular socio-political
debate and, in particular, by addressing the relevant history of ideas (see, e.g.,
Wodak & Meyer 2001; Charteris-Black 2014). Musolff ’s (e.g. 2010) account
of the body politic metaphor is paradigmatic in this respect. In the present
volume, the contribution by Scott includes such a historical perspective. In a
parallel fashion, more and more studies are available that use a comparative
approach across cultures, again exemplified by Musolff (2021) as well as his
contribution to the present volume.
Both Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Linguistics form part of what has come
to be called the “second” cognitive turn in the humanities (cf., e.g., Sinha 2007),
and more specifically, in linguistics. Right from the start, they shared a number of
key commitments as well as analytical tools. However, there were differences in
several crucial respects. Most importantly, in Cultural Linguistics, the respective
socio-cultural group is considered as the locus of conceptualisations, leaning on
the notion of distributed cognition (cf. Sharifian 2003, 2011, 2017a). This within-
the-group cognitivism contrasted quite sharply with the between-the-ears cogni-
tivism dominant in early Cognitive Linguistics (Sharifian 2017a). It is true that
with the turn to a socio-cultural view of language in contemporary mainstream
CL, this difference has become smaller. However, it still constitutes distinct foci.
Furthermore, in their original conception, the two approaches differed quite
significantly in terms of their self-image: While CL perceived and presented itself
as a genuinely new paradigm, Cultural Linguistics has always seen itself very
explicitly as a continuation of long-standing strands in the humanities that put
the nexus of language and culture centre-stage. In particular, Cultural Linguistics
stresses its roots in anthropologically-oriented approaches to language in the tra-
dition of Humboldt, Boas and Sapir, in ethnolinguistics and in the ethnography
of speaking (cf. Sharifian 2015b). This spirit also guides the Handbook of Lan-
guage and Culture (Sharifian 2015a), which documents the research programme
of Cultural Linguistics. By embracing these traditions, Cultural Linguistics has
been characterised by vectors of interdisciplinary pluralism different from those
of the original CL, which aligned primarily with cognitive psychology and enac-
tivism. Again, these differences have become smaller with a growing number of
cognitive linguists seeing language as a chiefly socio-cultural phenomenon and
thus seeking contact with the social sciences for their own analyses.
Introduction 5
A comprehensive theoretical foundation for Cultural Linguistics was first laid

out by Palmer (1996). Its current core, in the view advocated by Sharifian (e.g.
2017a), is the notion of cultural conceptualisations, with a subsequent distinction
between cultural categories, cultural schemas and cultural metaphors. This frame-
work has been applied to a wide range of linguistic phenomena in numerous lan-
guages, as documented in a series of collective volumes (e.g. Sharifian & Palmer
2007; Sharifian 2017b) and in the issues of the International Journal of Language
and Culture published since 2014. A research field that has become central to Cul-
tural Linguistics over the last decade is the study of cultural conceptualisations
across varieties of English (e.g. Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009; Wolf, Polzenhagen &
Peters 2017; Callies & Onysko 2017; Sadeghpour & Sharifian 2021), a strand that
meets and partly overlaps with the emerging cognitive-sociolinguistics branch
within the wider context of CL (e.g. Kristiansen & Dirven 2008; Pütz, Robinson
& Reif 2012). Again, several LAUD symposia were important platforms for these
developments, e.g. 1996 on the topic of cultural context in communication across
languages, 1998 on linguistic relativity, 2006 on intercultural pragmatics, 2010 on
Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and, finally, 2018 the joined LAUD/CLIC symposium
on Cultural Linguistics.
2. Common ground
From the sketch given in the previous section it should be obvious that there
is considerable common ground between (cognitive) Critical Discourse Studies
and Cultural Linguistics. First and foremost, from a cognitive perspective, there
is a significant overlap of the key notions of these two paradigms, i.e. ‘ideology’
and ‘culture’. Dirven (1990), for instance, takes a broad understanding of ideology
going beyond any specific philosophical or political sense (for the distinction
between covert and overt ideologies, see below). In this view, ideology is, broadly
defined, “a system of thought”, “an implicit or explicit set of norms and values
which provide patterns for acting and/or patterns for living within a given social
network” (Dirven 1990: 565). ‘Culture’ is defined, at least in cognitive anthropol-
ogy, in similar terms, albeit with a much wider range of phenomena in mind to be
included and accounted for. For Hofstede, for instance, culture is “the collective
programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human
group from those of another” (Hofstede 2001: 9).
This overlapping concern has been pointed out continuously by proponents
of both frameworks. In his overview of Cultural Linguistics, Sharifian (2015c),
for instance, includes a chapter on political discourse analysis, explicitly stressing
mutual benefits of both approaches in this endeavour. However, we are certainly
not suggesting that Cultural Linguistics and Cognitive Discourse Studies can be
or should be fused into one and the same paradigm. René Dirven’s far-sighted
awareness mentioned above remains apt: We are dealing with distinct research
programmes, distinct perspectives and distinct foci.
What we are suggesting, however, is that both research programmes meet
in some, though certainly not all, of their trajectories. This meeting ground can
be seen as a continuum stretching between a cultural-linguistics and a critical-
discourse-studies pole. Depending on the specific topic and scope of an investi-
gation, this meeting ground can be fruitfully explored to varying degrees, from
the perspective of both poles. We wish to make this point, even at the risk of
oversimplifying, since we believe that it is borne out by the body of the studies
that are available and since it corresponds to our own experience from working
in the field.
The traditional CDA approach is primarily concerned with overt ideologies,
e.g. xenophobia, racism, sexism, all the facets of what has come to be termed
“ableism”, etc. To traditional CDA, ideology is a ‘modality of power’, i.e., structures
and attitudes that claim and exert dominance, and thus are structures of suppres-
sion. Fairclough (2003: 9; leaning on Bourdieu), for instance, states that “ideolo-
gies are representations of aspects of the world which can be shown to contribute
to establishing, maintaining and changing social relations of power, domination
and exploitation.” The focus of CDA is hence to analyse how this power is exerted
and manifest in the language used by representatives of a specific ideology. How-
ever, when pursuing this type of analysis, CDA scholars inevitably come across
systems of covert ideology (i.e. taken-for-granted stances that are not made
explicit; cf. Dirven, Polzenhagen & Wolf 2007 for this distinction) on which the
overt ones rest and feed. Pursued further, the analyst will meet deeply entrenched
systems of cultural conceptualisations underlying both overt and covert ideolo-
gies. For instance, overt ideologies such as xenophobia, racism, sexism, ableism,
etc. have a common basis in an us versus them distinction, applying it to specific
groups and imbuing it with a value matrix.
Consider the well-studied case of the Third-Reich rhetoric, in particular the
representation of Jews in Nazi ideology. The racist labels used for Jews included
parasite, subhuman and various linguistic disease metaphors. Studies such as
Hawkins (2001) and Musolff (e.g. 2008, 2010) show that these terms relate system-
atically to a number of general salient conceptualisations with a long tradition in
Western thought, in particular the great chain of being and the body politic
metaphor. It is against the background of the latter that Jews are represented as a
disease threatening the health of the Volkskörper (i.e. the nation as an organ-
ism/body). In a parallel fashion, the Nazi representation of Jews as parasites or
subhuman positions them as lower life forms within the great chain.
Introduction 7
These background structures, however, are not in themselves ideological.

The conceptualisation nation is an organism, for instance, brings forth such
unspectacular and fully lexicalised expressions as head of the state, the great
chain of being is one of the central conceptualisations underlying proverbs, e.g.
via the human behaviour is animal behaviour metaphor (cf. Lakoff & Turner
1989). From a strict CDA perspective, we are hence outside the genuine scope
of analysis. Instead, we are moving on the home territory of Cultural Linguis-
tics. Furthermore, ideological systems other than the Nazi ideology frequently
draw from the same background conceptualisations; in fact, these background
conceptualisations belong to the common stock of many ideologies. From a strict
CDA perspective, this type of analysis may thus be seen as moving away from the
immediate ideology targeted by the study. However, the cultural-linguistic per-
spective contributes new facets to the critical analysis of the respective ideologies.
The relevant background conceptualisations have been interpreted and employed
in very specific and quite distinct ways over the centuries. For the great chain of
being, this has been shown, for instance, in Lovejoy’s classic study from 1936, and
for the body politic metaphor by Musolff (e.g. 2004, 2010, 2021). Such insights
invite a comparative analysis which works out the construal specific to a particu-
lar ideology. Furthermore, this type of analysis shows how ideologies use anchor
points in the general system of cultural conceptualisations. Studies along these
lines thus also reveal an important aspect of why specific ideologies are appeal-
ing to people; they are appealing, to a significant extent, because they feed on
shared, taken-for-granted and largely unconscious, conceptual patterns in the tar-
get group.
In a parallel fashion, the continuum between CDA and Cultural Linguistics
can be fruitfully explored from the vantage point of the latter. Again, this explo-
ration is often an extension that comes naturally. The example we wish to give
comes from the work of one of the present authors. Wolf & Polzenhagen (2009)
provide an analysis of the cultural model of community in (West) African Eng-
lish, an endeavour firmly within the territory of (anthropological) Cultural Lin-
guistics. They show that, in this context, community is conceptualised along
the lines of the family concept, with community members being kin, leaders
being fathers/mothers, etc. Mutual obligations within the community are con-
strued as an eating and feeding pattern. These sets of conceptualisations also
dominate political discourse. Political and socio-cultural groups are construed
in terms of family membership, and the political system is largely based on an
order of (virtual) kinship relations (cf., e.g., Schatzberg 2001). Thus, family con-
ceptualisations take the central place occupied by the body politic metaphor in
the Western context (see above). Discourse on power, in turn, is a metaphoric
discourse along the lines of the eating and feeding pattern, as aptly expressed
in Bayart’s (1993) notion of African politics being a ‘politics of the belly’. Wolf and
Polzenhagen’s analysis of the cultural model of community thus blends into an
analysis of political discourse. They also show how another central element of the
community model, i.e. its spiritual dimension, is exploited in the realm of pol-
itics, and add a case study on the conceptualisation of corruption (Polzenhagen
& Wolf 2021 [2007]).
These two examples illustrate the meeting ground between Critical Discourse
Studies and Cultural Linguistics along the continuum overt ideologies – covert
ideologies – cultural conceptualisations.
3. Contributions to the volume
The present volume reflects, first of all, the disciplinary plurality of the field. It
includes papers written from an explicitly cognitive-linguistic, more specifically
metaphor-based, perspective (e.g. Musolff, Jäkel, Reif ), from a cultural-linguistic
background (e.g. Baş Keškić, Scott) as well as with a vantage point in social psy-
chology (Hinner), intercultural communication (Giorgis) and cognitive seman-
tics (Tsujimura).
The contribution by Andreas Musolff adds to the wealth of his earlier studies
of the body politic metaphor. He presents selected data from a large-scale ques-
tionnaire survey conducted among speakers of various languages on the interpre-
tation of metaphors pertaining to the conceptualisation of the nation as a body.
In his paper, he compares some of the results obtained from the groups of English
and German L1 speakers, in both a qualitative and quantitative analysis. He iden-
tifies significant similarities as well as differences between the two groups. The lat-
ter reflect the groups’ specific historical experiences as well as different pragmatic
stances, in particular with respect to ironic uses of the relevant metaphors.
Olaf Jäkel analyses competing conceptualisations of the 2016 presidential
elections in the US which manifested in the media coverage as well as in campaign
speeches by the then candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The theoret-
ical background to his study is Charteris-Black’s notion of purposeful metaphor.
For Donald Trump, for instance, Jäkel identifies the conceptualisation of elec-
tions as a trial / law suit. In the logic of this metaphor, members of the political
caste such as Clinton have to stand a trial with the voters giving a verdict on
them (Lock her up!), while Trump, according to his self-framing, is counted out
from the trial as being an anti-establishment candidate. Hilary Clinton, in turn,
makes use of the metaphoric model of elections as a job interview, alluding to
Trump’s history as the reality-TV boss in “The Apprentice” and thus questioning
Trump’s fitness for office (You are fired!). In the remaining part of his paper, Jäkel
Introduction 9
compares the above-mentioned metaphors employed by Trump and Clinton to

Obama’s use of the conventional journey metaphor, based on a corpus of eight of
his speeches.
The corpus study by Monika Reif investigates the uptake, mixing and
(non-)continuation of metaphors and metaphor scenarios related to migration/
migrants in reader comment sections of selected British broadsheets and tabloids.
It is shown how certain facets of the source domain are highlighted and back-
grounded in order to serve the argumentative interests of the writer. At the same
time, potential correlations between specific conceptual metaphors and argu-
mentative topoi are investigated, with a particular focus on mixed metaphors.
Reif argues that the combinations of conceptual metaphors found in instances
of mixed metaphor often create cognitive dissonance, but that the wish for dra-
matic effect through exaggeration appears to justify the merger of two seemingly
incompatible metaphors. The argumentative aim thus seems to be more impor-
tant than the internal coherence of the mixed metaphor itself. She further finds
that in their comments, language users repeatedly draw on specific lexical items
linked to a restricted area of the source domain. It is not surprising, therefore, that
the discourse surrounding the topic of migration comes across as highly conven-
tionalised at times, especially within socio-political echo chambers.
Kader Baş Keškić contributes a comparative corpus-linguistic study on ani-
mal metaphors in African Englishes and British English, more specifically
metaphors involving the concept of goat. Her data come from ICE-corpora of
the respective varieties as well as from the Nigerian and Ghanaian component of
the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Her focus is on the use and
implications of goat metaphors in two West-African varieties of English (Nige-
ria, Ghana) and the cultural background to these metaphors. The key theoretical
background to her study is Lovejoy’s notion of the great chain of being, which
has been used in many cognitive and cultural-linguistic investigations. She analy-
ses goat metaphors in three discourse domains: sexuality, religion and politics.
Natsuko Tsujimura takes a semantic approach to cultural concepts, with the
respective lexical items as her anchor point. Her example is cooking verbs in
Japanese culinary culture. Here, we find an extensive set of distinct lexicalisations
for the various ways of processing food. Tsujimura provides a detailed descrip-
tion of this set, comparing the respective lexical fields in English and Japanese,
which leads her to a reanalysis of earlier accounts. She then focusses on the rich
inventory of mimetics and verb-verb compounds that specify manner of cooking.
Here, she identifies patterns that are parallel to the well-known case of manner-
of-motion verbs. The resulting stock of items allows for a fine-grained linguistic
representation of cooking processes and preserves culturally constructed concep-
tualisations of food preparation.
Penelope Scott analyses the current discourse on “clean eating” from a

cultural-linguistic vantage point. She first traces the evolution of concepts of
health in Anglo-Saxon culture, with texts from the Old English period as her
reference point. This way, she anchors the current discourse on “clean eating”
in a long tradition of Western medical notions of balance, cleanness and
wholeness. She then presents a qualitative analysis of podcasts and Reddit posts
linked to the “clean eating” community, showing how these traditional notions are
recontextualised in current discourse.
Paola Giorgis takes a cultural-linguistic perspective on the notion of Other-
ing. In the first part of her paper, she traces strategies of Othering in various fields
of discourse. She discusses, inter alia, examples from literary texts (e.g. Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels), the construction of political enemies (e.g. in the US and Rus-
sia during WW II), the representation of Jews in Nazi Germany (based on Klem-
perer’s classic study of the language of the Third Reich) and the discourse on
immigrants in the US and elsewhere. She then focusses on the role of language in
the construction of the other since a foreign language (an-other language) can
be seen as a crucial element in defining the other in terms of an us versus them
dichotomy. She argues that the field of foreign language education is a predestined
context to counter stereotyping and Othering, and she presents a case study of a
classroom activity she conducted to this end.
Stereotyping and, more specifically, prejudice, are also the concern of the
contribution by Michael Hinner. His paper is guided by the observation that in
order to counter, overcome and ultimately avoid prejudiced conceptualisations,
one needs to be aware of the (cognitive) mechanisms underlying the formation of
stereotypes. Thus, he provides a review of relevant theories and concepts in social
psychology that shed light on elements and factors contributing to the construc-
tion of prejudiced conceptualisations. Several of the theories addressed by Hinner
have served as important background models in CDA, Cognitive Sociolinguis-
tics and Cultural Linguistics. Van Dijk’s work in CDA, for instance, is strongly
informed by social psychology. Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory was instrumen-
tal, inter alia, to Kristiansen’s (2003) study of allophones as cognitive reference
points for social cognition. Key notions that are covered by Hinner’s contribution
include the formation of attitudes, self-image and identity as well as mechanisms
of persuasion. Hinner calls for educational programmes that are informed by
these theoretical insights and sees a particularly strong potential in schemes that
combine foreign language instruction with multicultural education and diversity
training.
Most of the contributions present original empirical studies. These analyses
explore the meeting ground between Critical Discourse Studies and Cultural Lin-
guistics sketched above in Section 2 to varying degrees. Jäkel, Reif and Musolff
Introduction 11
move along the continuum with a vantage point in (Cognitive) Critical Discourse
Studies. Baş Keškić and Scott, in turn, come from the Cultural-Linguistics end and
reach out to the territory of political discourse. Again, we are not suggesting that
the two frameworks should be fused into one. What the volume wishes to illus-
trate is that travelling along the continuum is a natural and fruitful endeavour for
both approaches.
References
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Culture-specific variation in interpretations
of nations as bodies metaphors
by English and German L1 speakers
Andreas Musolff
University of East Anglia
One of the key-metaphor complexes in conceptualizing national identity is

that of the nation as a body or a person. Nation -embodiment and
-personalization have had a long conceptual history and still figure
prominently in present-day political discourse. However, the socio-
psychological impact of these metaphors is still in question: does the
occurrence of embodied and personalized nation-depictions in public
discourse mean that recipients understand and interpret international
relations in terms of inter-body or inter-personal relationships?
New empirical evidence from a metaphor interpretation survey
conducted in 30 countries suggest that such conceptualizations do indeed
occur and lead to creative elaboration and inter-metaphor blendings.
Moreover, it can be shown that the elicited metaphor interpretations relate
to culture-specific discourse traditions. The chapter compares data from the
English and German L1 survey samples and discusses their implications for
the analysis of metaphor understanding.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, culture, pragmatics, variation, universal

vs. relative
1. Introduction
When asked to apply the “metaphor of the nation as a body” to their own nation
as part of a project of cross-cultural metaphor comparison (Musolff 2020, 2021),
four students from Britain, the United States, Germany and Austria gave the fol-
lowing answers:
(1) England is an organism. Its head is the Queen, its torso and limbs are the state
and government. Its heart is culture and history, its brain is parliament. Its [sic]
feet is the economy. (E, UK, M, 25)
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.01mus
16 Andreas Musolff
(2) […] like Frankenstein [i.e.: Frankenstein’s monster], we have an abnormal

brain commanding the body, which is causing our country to act and react
with more negativity and distastefulness. (E, US, 48, F)
(3) The German body has a strange form, which causes it to be very diverse.
Because there are so many different viewpoints, it always is in conflict with
itself. To cure this conflict and to forget about past events, the body sedates itself
with lots of beer. (G, G, 21, M)
(4) Austria is a slightly overweight blonde man in his early 50s. […] He’s about 1.8m
tall, a pretty average size to display his mediocrity. (G, AUST, 27, M)1
These ‘personalized’ descriptions of the nation are remarkable in various respects,

but first and foremost they may surprise as answers to a prompt that only asked
for a “body”-related answer. For the respective respondents, the metaphor of the
nation as person seems compatible, if not synonymous, with that of the nation
as body. This association could be motivated in principle by the metonymy body
for person, which in its turn may be grounded in a folk-theoretical assumption
that prototypical ‘bodies’ are (like) human ones. But does that mean that every-
one interpreting the nation as body metaphor is basing it on that metonymy?
Furthermore, in the above-quoted examples the nation as person metaphor
is used as a kind of conceptual platform to construct detailed characterizations of
the nation-person as a child, or a bipolar personality, or a mediocre man. These
specifications are vivid, with dramatic and/or narrative elements and allusions,
as well as explicitly and implicitly evaluative. Are these narrative and evaluative
aspects implied in the metaphor, or are they additional, cohort- and context-
specific interpretations? In other words, we can ask whether it is best to describe
the examples as instances of one single metaphor, or as conceptually and/or
pragmatically different sub-versions. This chapter aims to relate these theoretical
aspects of metaphor variation to an empirical survey of metaphor interpretations
and to propose a distinction between conceptual and pragmatic levels of variation.
2. The ubiquity of metaphor variation
The study of variation phenomena in metaphor use and reception has become a
highly productive sub-field for investigations in the already vast domain of cogni-
tive studies of figurative language. This was not always so. In his 1993 chapter on
1. Italics in these and other examples are by the author. Omissions or additions are in square
brackets. Abbreviations in rounded brackets indicate respondents’ first language, nationality,
age and gender.
Culture-specific variation in interpretations of nations as bodies metaphors 17
“the contemporary theory of metaphor”, G. Lakoff laid down an “invariance prin-

ciple” which stated that “inherent target domain structure limits the possibilities
of mappings automatically”, i.e. the source domain ‘matches’ are selected without
the speakers’ conscious choice on the basis of image or conceptual correspon-
dences (1993: 215–216, 245). Accordingly, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)
focused on the systematicity and stability of metaphorical mappings and on their
fundamental role as a universal, unconsciously operating principle of mental
organization that was grounded in basic bodily experience or “embodiment”
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980/2003: 7–13 and 1999: 9–44; Kövecses 2002: 67–106,
163–182). Psycholinguistic experiments on metaphor understanding that were
inspired by CMT demonstrated the high speed and ease of processing and of
target referent identification for conventional metaphors and thus reinforced
assumptions of their “automatic” and “unconscious” comprehension and the
notion of metaphorical meanings as being as “invariant” as literal ones (Gibbs
1994: 80–119 and 2005: 182–187). Creative metaphors, especially in poetry and
other art forms, as well as in rhetorical uses (irony, satire, etc.), whose inter-
pretation has always been known as varied, were deconstructed as instances of
“elaborations” of more basic primary mappings or as “blendings” of multiple
source inputs and target inputs that could be conceptually incongruent and give
rise to counterfactual and/or fictional utterances (Lakoff & Turner 1989: 67–70;
Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 221–222).
Two areas of metaphor use where CMT has accepted and tried to account
for variation are cross-cultural metaphor comparison and the investigation of
political metaphor. In cross-cultural comparison, lexicalized metaphorical idioms
have been intensively investigated for conceptual contrasts and the effect of such
contrasts on language acquisition and multilingualism (Lakoff 1987; Idström &
Piirainen 2012; Kövecses 2002: 183–198, 2005, 2015: 73–96; Littlemore 2001;
Littlemore & Low 2006; MacArthur et al. 2012; MacArthur et al. 2015; Musolff
et al. 2014; Niemeier & Dirven 2000; Sharifian 2010, 2014; Yu 2008, 2015).
Kövecses’ (2015: 95) solution for the ‘linguistic relativity vs. universality’ question
in this field is a view of conceptual metaphors as “a gradient with bodily basis at
one end, cultural basis at the other, with doubly motivated cases of conceptual
metaphors in the middle”. This seemingly Solomonic verdict still has, however, an
inbuilt bias in favor of the ‘universalist’ side, because all metaphors can of course
be subsumed under general schemas of body-based experience such as more is
up, abstract entities are objects, time is movement, etc., so that culture-
specific metaphor variation can always be viewed as secondary to ‘primary’ uni-
versal mappings.
Analyzing ideologically motivated variation of political metaphors has also
been a mainstay of CMT research since the seminal publication of Metaphors We
18 Andreas Musolff
Live By (see Lakoff & Johnson 1980/2003: 156–157) and has become a focus for
a multitude of studies that combine cognitive, corpus-linguistic and discourse-
analytical approaches. Many recent studies (e.g. Ahrens 2009; Musolff 2004, 2016;
Charteris-Black 2004, 2014, 2019; Chilton & Lakoff 1995; Perrez et al. 2019) ana-
lyze variation as corpus-based evidence of differential preferences for specific
metaphor variants across ideological or party-political stances of users as well as
across genres, topics and situational contexts. In addition, experimental “response
elicitation” studies of metaphor reception/understanding have shown differential
“framing”, i.e. attitude-reinforcing or -changing, effects (Brugman & Burgers 2018;
Burgers et al. 2016; Flusberg et al. 2018; Thibodeau & Boroditsky 2011, 2013,
Thibodeau et al. 2019). They measure speed and physiological conditions of recip-
ients’ responses with the aim of testing hypotheses about the metaphors’ impact
on the categorization of target topics and on attitudes towards them. But where
such tests seem to provide supporting evidence of such impact, there still remains
the question of whether the respective metaphors are “a cause or a symptom of
urgency” (Thibodeau et al. 2019: 183–184).
The question of the reception/understanding of metaphorical utterances has
also been given much attention in “Relevance Theory” (RT), which initially
accounted for metaphors under the category of “loose uses of language” (Sperber
& Wilson 1995: 234) within the wider framework of a pragmatic theory of
“ostensive-inferential communication” (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 50, passim).
Metaphor “and a variety of related tropes (e.g. hyperbole, metonymy, synec-
doche)” are thus viewed as “creative exploitations” of contextual effects of an
utterance in the “search for optimal relevance” that leads a speaker “to adopt, on
different occasions, a more or less faithful expression of her thoughts” (1995: 237),
so that the hearer can work out its implications without much processing effort.
Metaphors, as one main type of “loose uses” of language, are arraigned on a
cline of creativity, with those at the top end where “a variety of contextual effects
can be retained and understood [by the hearer] as weakly implicated by the
speaker” (1995: 236) and at the other end conventionalized, near-literal uses. RT
proponents have expanded on this account, effectively distinguishing two types
of metaphor understanding: “rapid on-line ad hoc concept formation” in every-
day communication and “slower, more reflective interpretive inferences” that are
required for creative metaphors (Carston & Wearing 2011: 310). Of particular
interest for our discussion are attempts to merge CMT and RT in a “Hybrid The-
ory of Metaphor” (Tendahl 2009), in which these theories “complement” each
other (Gibbs & Tendahl 2011). Both CMT and RT reject models of metaphor
understanding that assume a laborious progression from an initial literal inter-
pretation, to be followed by the hearer’s realization of its falsity or absurdity and
then a further mental operation that “indirectly” works out some version of the
speaker’s intended meaning. Instead, CMT and RT acknowledge that the process-
ing effort for metaphors and other “loose uses of language” need not be greater
than for literal language use. On this basis, Tendahl and Gibbs assign the analy-
sis of “enduring metaphorical knowledge” to CMT and the study of “pragmatic
inferential processes” in diverse situational contexts to RT (Tendahl & Gibbs
2008: 1861). This division of labor between the cognitive and pragmatic (RT)
accounts looks very neat but seems to replicate CMT’s universalist bias in that
(pragmatic) variation is relegated to the conceptually contingent situation con-
text, whereas “enduring metaphorical knowledge” is dealt with by the cognitive
approach. In terms of our research questions, the variation in Examples (1)–(4)
would then just be the appearance of nuances in applying one and the same con-
ceptual metaphor. But is such a neat separation of universal metaphors and their
‘merely’ situationally motivated variation plausible?
3. Variation in metaphor corpora
Political metaphor variation serves to define ideologies as well as political group-

ings, as shown by G. Lakoff in his studies of the strict father and nurturant
parent models of the nation as family metaphor, which divide ‘conservatives’
and ‘progressives’ in US political discourse (Lakoff 1996; Lakoff & Wehling 2016).
Methodologically, however, this ‘discovery’ of opposing metaphor variants is
open to criticism for being circular, given that its database has been derived from
assumptions about political ideologies which then led to finding ‘fitting’ examples.
The occurrence of these examples is indisputable but what is their significance?
Some of the response elicitation experiments mentioned above have tried to over-
come this problem by combining conceptual and psychological evidence, but as
stated above, the exact nature of the relationship between metaphorical stimuli
and responses (i.e. whether it is causal or symptomatic) remains under discussion.
A further empirically oriented avenue to test hypotheses of metaphor variation
is represented by corpus-based analyses of metaphor use (Charteris-Black 2004;
Deignan 2005; Musolff & Wong 2020; Perrez et al. 2019). It is within this context
that I discuss data from a cross-cultural survey of the nation as body metaphor
that included the Examples (1)–(4) cited above, with a specific focus on metaphor
reception. The project was triggered by a surprise result of a vocabulary check
on the term body politic in a seminar of international students in 2011 (Musolff
2020). The responses fell into two groups: those given by students from Britain,
the US, Spain, the Ukraine and Arab countries described states and/or nations as
bodies and/or persons but the other set of responses, given by Chinese students,
linked geographical places (cities, regions) to parts of the human anatomy and
20 Andreas Musolff
constructed analogies between them and political institutions based in the respec-
tive cities (e.g. government in the capital) or provinces, thus conceptualizing their
nation as geobody.
As the initial group of informants (n = 14) was far too small to furnish reliable
conclusions, a much larger sample of responses was needed, as well as a simple
questionnaire that avoided the term body politic with its historical baggage and
morphologically archaic structure (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002, vol.
1: 258). With a small research team, we devised the following task: “The concept
of ‘nation’ can be described by way of a metaphor or simile that presents it in
terms of a human body. Please apply this metaphor to your home nation in 5–6
sentences”. The deliberate vagueness of both the source and the target concepts
(nation, body) was designed to leave room for creative interpretations. Beyond
that one question-task, we asked the respondents (who remained anonymous) to
provide sociolinguistic information on their first language, nationality, age and
gender. As could be expected, the age-range of respondents was concentrated in
the 18–25 bracket. The gender distribution was slanted in favor of female infor-
mants, with usually more than 55% and in some cases more than 70% female
students.
The questionnaire was distributed from 2012 onwards, with the generous sup-
port of colleagues and students, in language- and communicated degree programs
at universities in thirty countries, resulting in nearly 2100 completed question-
naires from respondents. Some 200 of these failed to answer the question in
a meaningful way and were discarded from the database, which left a total of
1850 relevant completed questionnaires; these were reduced further to 1772 ques-
tionnaires grouped into 24 different L1 backgrounds, excluding mini-samples.
The selected L1 samples in the corpus were: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (i.e.
Mandarin and Cantonese), Croatian, Dutch/Flemish, English, French, German,
Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Pasto and/
or Urdu, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish,
Ukrainian. The body and geobody interpretations that we encountered at first
as well as the person version (Examples (1)–(4) were used many times over and
formed distinctive textual patterns in the corpus. Such patterns can be regarded
as “scenarios” in the sense of concept clusters combining lexical and textual fram-
ing material (i.e. membership in semantic fields, collocations and coherent story-
lines). Such scenario-based corpus analysis has been employed in a number of
studies of metaphor usage in public discourse (Deignan 2010; Heyvaert 2019;
Semino 2008, 2016; Semino et al. 2018; Musolff 2006, 2016) but not yet in the
investigation of metaphor reception.
When applied to the corpus of nation as body responses, the scenarios of
body, geobody and person covered the vast majority (80%+) of answers but two
further sub-variants were found which were conceptually and pragmatically dis-
tinct, i.e. depictions of the nation as part of a (larger) body and as part of
ego’s (i.e. the writer’s) body. The following examples illustrate these additional
scenarios:
(5) England is like an appendix, not very significant anymore but can still cause
trouble and make you realize it’s there if it wants to. (E, UK, 18, M)
(6) I grew up in my nation like I grew up in my body, getting to know better both of
them with age. It’s the place my heart is at. Both act as the foundation of who I
am. (G, G, 24, F)
In (5), England is seen as a body part which is stereotypically useless but can still
cause pain to its larger body. In (6), the writer equates her nation with herself and
in particular a place in her heart, thus expressing patriotic identification. With
these supplementary scenarios in addition to body, geobody and person, the
multitude of recorded body/person-related source-concepts in the survey cor-
pus, which ran into more than one hundred for many L1-samples, could be sum-
marized into five scenario-clusters. Coding for source concepts was carried on
the basis of the MIPVU-procedure (Steen et al. 2010), and for scenarios on the
basis of collocation patterns and narrative links. Pragmatic implicatures were also
coded if sufficient context (in the sense of manifest co-text) was provided in the
answer. Many short responses did not provide enough context to allow unambigu-
ous pragmatic assessments, so eventually only emphatically negative and ironical
scenario versions as well as the (few) humorous ones were coded. In the following
sections I present findings for the English and German L1 samples, with a particu-
lar focus on culture-specific allusions and pragmatic aspects such as irony, humor
and evaluation.
3.1 The English L1 sample
The sample of responses from informants with English as their first language was
collected across Britain, the USA, New Zealand, and Australia as well as from
various European universities. It includes 183 responses altogether, 59 by British
nationals, 34 by US, 42 by New Zealand and 46 by Australian nationals, one by
an Irish and one by a Canadian national. This sample generated 232 scenario
instances, which showed the following distribution:
Given a history of body politic lexicalization which goes back 500 years, and
of political theory traditions that conceptualized the nation state as a body reach-
ing back to the Middle Ages (Harvey 2007; Nederman 2004), there can be no
surprise that the body scenario is the dominant one in the English L1 sample. It
implies a hierarchical structure and interdependence, i.e. a top-down orientation
of life-essential vs. non-essential, ‘noble’ and ‘lowly’ organs/limbs. The body part
22 Andreas Musolff
Table 1. Scenario distribution: English L1

Number of scenarios overall: 232 (= 100%)
Scenarios body geobody body part part of ego person
Tokens 103 59 23 2 45
Percentages 44% 25% 10% 1% 20%
scenario allows authors to comment on aspects of the body politic that they want
to hold up to praise or ridicule. It overlaps with the geobody-scenario, which
assigns the respective national capitals top status (head, brain or heart), whilst
some places or regions are relegated to ‘lower’ and even taboo regions in the
nation-body, which can be exploited for humoristic or polemical effects:
(7) The backside of England is Hull (E, UK, 19, F)
(8) […] certain parts of [America] (specifically the upper eastern, but not on the
coast) [are] referred to as the “armpit” of the nation, implying that it is stinky,
and gross. (E, US, 31, F)
(9) Tasmania is the nether regions of Australia. (E, AUS, 19, M)
(10) Canberra is the ass of Australia (E, AUS, 20, M)
On the other hand, regions can be emphatically and ‘patriotically’ endorsed, most
often as the heart, in the symbolic sense of the ‘seat’ of the soul of the respective
nation:
(11) Britain’s […] heart is in Yorkshire (E, UK, 21, F)
(12) Uluru is the heart of Australia, soulfully connecting us to our surrounds
(E, AUS, 18, M)
(13) I grew up in the upper Midwest (Dakotas), and have always known it as “the
heartland” for two reasons. First is that it is in the middle of the country, just as
the heart is said to be in the center of the body. I have also heard it in terms of
the fact that the people who live in the Midwest have a lot of heart (E, US, 31, F)
(14) The Gaeltacht is the heart/soul of Ireland (E, IR, 19, F)
part of ego examples are only minimally in evidence,2 whereas the nation as
person scenario, which accounts for one fifth of all instances, is used to depict
2. E.g.: “Our culture is the feet we stand on” (E, UK, 21, F); “No matter where we are in the
world, Australia is still in hearts, allowing me to grow keeping them beating.” (E, AUS, 18, F)
the respective nation in a personal (e.g. age-specific) role, with (supposedly) cor-
responding ‘typical’ behavior and character traits, as in the following examples:
(15) England is an ageing person, one that has been going for a long time. […] Eng-
land used to have many other clothes (colonies) to dress itself in. However, it
has since given away all of it’s [sic] clothes. (E, UK, 18, F)
(16) My nation is fat. Lying supine, its head is in the center, as well as its feat [sic].
[…] Its fat is a combination of future pregnancy, a bloaded [sic] past and an
uncontrollable metabolism. (E, US, 25, M)
(17) New Zealand is like a little brother chasing after the nations of the world and
clamouring for attention. (E, NZ, 18, F)
(18) I would equate Australia to a body during adolescence. Ideologies are develop-
ing and changing at a rapid pace, though not without internal conflict. The
brain is exposed to new hormones such as the older generation of Australia is
exposed to multiculturalism and expected to adjust to it. The parasites are the
people who reject these inclusive notions. (E, AUS, 18, F)
When such explicitly biased personalizations are combined with similarly evalua-
tive body and body part conceptualizations, we count 94 judgmental comments
that depict the respondents’ home nations in an explicitly negative perspective
(39 instances) or ridicule it implictly, i.e. ironically (45 instances) or give a
sympathetic-humorous (10 instances) characterization. When calculated as a per-
centage of scenario instantiations, this yields a figure of 41%, which is the highest
across all sizeable cohorts (i.e. those with more than 50 scenario instances).
Within the English L1-sample we find subtle differences between the distinct
‘national’ cohorts, although the imbalance of sub-sample sizes makes it difficult
to gauge their statistical significance. The British sub-sample is characterized by
matching amounts of critical and ironical comments (n = 18 for each type) and a
small minority of four humorous comments, yielding 40 instances altogether. The
ironical remarks are still polite, focusing mainly on vaguely ridiculous body parts
and employing euphemisms (appendix, belly button, backside). In the smaller US
cohort, the overall number of examples for all three types is 17. Here the criti-
cism is more sarcastic, with references to bipolar brain function, Frankenstein-like
features (Example (2) above) and deadly cancer threatening the body politic. The
New Zealand sample has 14 relevant examples, the majority of which are creative,
humorous references to the nation as an inexperienced person (child; see Exam-
ple (17)), as being emotional rather than rational, or as a body part of uncertain
status (middle toe). The 23 examples in the Australian cohort, on the other hand,
show a distinct predilection for taboo body parts and drastic conceptualizations
24 Andreas Musolff
(butt, nether regions, ass) that serve outspoken and sarcastic, rather than implicit
ironical, criticism.
3.2 The German L1 sample
Among the European non-English L1 samples, the German L1 sample is the

largest with 229 completed questionnaires. These were collected at the Univer-
sities of Heidelberg and Bonn in Germany and at the “Alpen-Adria University”
in Klagenfurt (Austria) as well as from a few guest students in the UK and USA.
There were no informants from Switzerland. The Austrian sub-cohort includes 22
students in Klagenfurt and 9 students at German universities, so that 31 students
altogether have an Austrian background.
Out of a total of 319 of scenario instances, their scenario distribution in the
German-L1 sample shows an even stronger preponderance of the body scenario
than the English L1 sample, and it has person, not geobody, as its second-most
frequent scenario:
Table 2. Scenario distribution: German L1

Number of scenarios overall: 319 (= 100%)
Scenarios body geobody body part part of ego person
Scenario tokens 177 25 19 19 79
Percentages 55% 8% 6% 6% 25%
In order to facilitate the comparison with the English L1 sample, I will discuss
the scenarios in the same order: body, geobody, body part, part of ego, per-
son. This ordering has the advantage of ending on the person scenario, which
provides the strongest contrasts vis-à-vis the English L1 sample and also includes
most Austria-specific conceptualizations.
The German L1 sample is even more dominated by the nation as (whole)
body scenario than the English L1 sample and has more lexical instances, i.e. 613,
across 44 body sub-concepts (the latter are fewer than in the English-L1 sam-
ple) and 19 health/illness-related sub-concepts (i.e. almost double the num-
ber of English-L1 concepts). This finding can be explained by the fact that the
nation as body metaphor in German, whilst lacking one outstanding lexicaliza-
tion such as body politic, has at least as long a historical track record as the English
metaphor going back to the 16th century (Musolff 2010: 121–136). As in the English
L1-sample, the (whole) body scenario often serves to highlight the interdepen-
dency of all body parts:
(19) The nation is a functional system made of several smaller organisms as is the
body. For the nation to function groups of people have to fulfil certain tasks.
This is comparable to human organs that accomplish a task within the body.
(G, G, 20, F)
Also similarly to the English L1 sample, the head signifies the highest place in the
political body-hierarchy. Both Germany and Austria have the institution of a “fed-
eral president” who could occupy that slot. However, as it is referred to only once
in the German L1 sample (i.e. for Austria), it seems that the head of state-position
in the German-speaking countries does not match the kudos of long-established
heads of state in other countries, such as a ceremonial monarch or a president
as most powerful office-holder. The head position is instead either occupied by
the most powerful national politician, i.e. in Germany and Austria alike, the Fed-
eral Chancellor, or the government or parliament, or the abstract notion of a rule-
governed state:
(20) The chancellor is the head of the German nation as he/she can be seen as the
brain that controls and leads every other part of the body. (G, G, 21, F)
(21) Just as the human body, my home nation has a head, consisting of rules,
boundaries, concepts and other structures. (G, AUST, 30, F)
The heart concept is used predominantly to refer to the people/population or its

social system, as a target for emotional or ethical identification, which brings the
head/brain vs. heart dichotomy (metonymically standing for reason vs. emo-
tion/character) into play:
(22) While people represent the heart of a democracy, our government sort of acts
as its brain, even unwillingly so. (G, AUST, 22, M)
hands, arms, feet and legs are used as source concepts for designating subor-
dinate ‘executive’ institutions and/or their personnel as well as other significant
parts of society. In the Austrian sub-cohort, arms feature mainly as a source for
highlighting its welcoming, friendly attitude towards other nations and/or immi-
grants, i.e. in fact as a person-attribute:
(23) The media can be referred to as the hands and arms because they interact and
influence the way the whole system behaves. (G, G, 19, F)
(24) My home nation [is] always willing to help out others. Its arms are wide open
to welcome everybody. (G, AUST, 19, M)
In contrast to the English-L1 sample, the use of ‘lower’ or taboo body parts for
categorizing aspects of the nation is rare. The liver is employed once to char-
acterize the justice system because of its cleansing function, i.e. not with deni-
26 Andreas Musolff
grating implications. Likewise, the stomach or belly is positively connoted as

a “vital organ” and refers to the people. Taboo body part concepts only appear
twice (NB: both times supplied by male informants). One informant called the
government an ass (because “they constantly produce … [sic]”; G, G, 18, M).
Another one denounced a far-right wing party as an aggressive male sexual
organ: “The Alternative für Deutschland, a party that recently emerged, can be
described as a penis that penetrated our nation” (G, G, 24, M). Apart from these
cases of taboo body part ascription, negatively loaded body-related concepts in
the German L1 sample are mainly drawn from the health-disease sub-domain.
They are infrequent (with only 36 instantiations altogether = 6%) but highly dif-
ferentiated, often targeting historical or current political problems, e.g. scars
(“scarfs [sic] from history”), injury (“invasions during a war could be considered
injuries”), infection (for “dangerous mindsets, conjuring up horrific visions
of past times”), cancer (for “racism”), paralysis (“Germany is paralyzed with
shock”, due to acts of terrorism).3 The immune system is related to the police.
Political reform as a medical treatment includes the sub-concepts therapy,
medical aid and doctor.
In comparison with the nation as body scenario, the nation as part of
(a larger) body and nation as part of ego scenarios’ frequencies in the Ger-
man L1-corpus are small, amounting to less than 10% each. Among the source
concepts, heart, head, brain, face, eyes and hands are the most frequent
ones. Within the nation as body part scenario there is a clear divide between
two main versions. One of these, which is used exclusively by German nationals,
relates their nation to Europe/the European Union as the larger whole, with an
explicit leadership claim, as in this example:
(25) Germany is the “heart” of Europe […] since the heart is the place where all
other parts are connected to and get the oxygen that is needed from.
(G, G, 20, F)
The other version does not specify the larger body but focuses on the nation as
body part’s inherent qualities. This version is shared by German and Austrian
respondents:
(26) The nation can present itself first and foremost in the form of the human
brain, able to recall past events and adapting present behavior and attitudes to
that history. (G, G, 20, F)
3. Written after a terrorist attack in Berlin in December 2016, when the questionnaire was coin-
cidentally distributed in a German university.
(27) Austria in terms of nation is like a hand. It helps other nations, but as a stand
alone [sic] it does not hold much power. It’s needed to fulfil a lot of things [sic],
but in order to accomplish anything, it needs other nations/body parts. It’s like
a left hand in a world of right handed people. (G, AUST, 19, F)
The last cited example is ambivalent in first portraying the hand Austria in a pos-
itive way, as helping other nations, but then voicing skepticism to the point of
allocating the nation the less useful role of a left hand in a world of right handed
people.
In the German L1-cohort’s nation as body part scenario versions, the
absence of negatively loaded or taboo sources is even more conspicuous than in
the nation as body scenario. The most dissociating uses are two interpretations
of face and arms that exploit their conventionalized symbolism (as expressions
of specific attitudes) to imply a narratively extended critique of the nation as per-
son:
(28) Germany may seem as a face with two sides. This [sic] two faces may divide the
nation in east and west; conservative – progressive; urban – rural; German –
not-German. Nevertheless, there is one nation as there is one face but with a
different outward appearance. (G, G, 29, M)
(29) Austria is like folded arms, because the people are reserved and introverted. A
person with folded arms holds back and thinks about something, without get-
ting too much attention. (G, AUST, 21, M)
These critical examples are unique. By contrast, the arms concept has ten pos-
itively slanted uses of arms as “open” or “extended” to welcome or link up with
other nations in the German and Austrian sub-cohorts (see Example (24) above),
and face appears 6 times, mainly as a friendly face of the Austrian or German
nation-person. Almost predictably, given its high ‘identification’ potential, the
nation as part of ego scenario includes only patriotic statements:
(30) Nation could be the skin colour or tongue. Standing together as the face of the
nation. (G, G, 21, F)
(31) Austria is like the warm summer skin. The feeling of your skin is the same feel-
ing you get when you explore the country. (G, AUST, 24, M)
Both the part of body and part of ego scenarios overlap with the per-
son-scenario, on account of the fact that some body parts can be interpreted
both physically and symbolically, as some of the examples cited above have
already shown, e.g. references to open or folded arms, helpful hand, friendly
face, friendly heart. We will take up the personalization topic after discussing
the geobody scenario.
28 Andreas Musolff
The geobody scenario plays a significantly smaller role in the German

L1-sample than in the English L1 one. As in the latter, the capital cities feature as
the heart and/or head/brain in the German L1 responses. The other parts of
the two countries’ geobodies are being presented in two main interpretive per-
spectives. The first of these is praise or humorous criticism of the landscape as a
body-scape:
(32) The typical Austrian body consists of huge mountains […] The eyes of the body
are a mixture of green and blue just like the many lakes we have in Austria. […]
Throughout the body are paths just like veins because Austrians like to go ski-
ing, running or riding their bikes. (G, AUST, 21, F)
(33) Germany is as full of hills as a person with acne. (G, G, 22, M)
The second perspective, which is exclusive to the German cohort, is an economic-

political pro-Western ranking of federal states along the former East-West Ger-
man dividing line:
(34) Germany could be described as a body because it consists of various regions (=
body parts). These regions differ from each other, there are different accents,
mentalities, but also different chances on job market/education. Maybe the
west would be the front of the body, while the east is the back. (G, G, 20, F)
(35) […] due to the federal structure one might apply the main organs to the finan-
cially strongest states, such as Bavaria, Hesse or Baden-Württemberg. Simulta-
neously, the eastern German states could be viewed as belonging to the
periphery (limbs) due to their number of population. This is of course histori-
cally incorrect as the current eastern German states were the former “heart-
land” of Germany. (G, G, 27, F)
The reference to a German “heartland” in the last example implies a problemati-

zation of the geo-social ranking of different German regions, with the region that
is now ‘Eastern’ Germany being conceptualized in a central position vis-à-vis the
even more easterly regions on the one hand (now = part of Poland) and Western
ones on the other, as historical “peripheries”. On the basis of our limited data set it
is impossible to judge whether this pro-West biased ranking is only characteristic
for West German informants or is shared nationally.
The person scenario in the German L1 sample makes up one quarter of
all scenario instances and ranges over 31 sub-concepts with 108 distinct lexical
instantiations. The most frequent of these is the character trait generosity/
friendliness with 14 instances, which are distributed equally between the Aus-
trian and German sub-cohorts:
(36) My home nation has a heart as good as gold, always willing to help out others.
Its arms are wide open to welcome everybody. The nation’s mind is strong and
powerful, aiming to make changes and decisions in favor of the population.
No matter what, it always keeps its smile and tries to stay positive.
(G, AUST, 20, F)
(37) Nation is strong and respectful. My nation is like the good mother Theresa. The
arms of my nation are open for everybody. My nation is openhearted for any
problems in the world. (G, G, 22, M)
The strong emphasis on a generous national character in the German and Aus-
trian cohorts may have to do with the fact that some questionnaires were distrib-
uted in the period 2015–2018, i.e. at a time when both countries experienced mass
immigration of refugees from the Middle East. This immigration target topic is
always viewed in a positive light, when mentioned, which is doubtlessly related to
the social selection of university students with an interest in foreign languages. It
is not representative of the respective national populations.
Other positive national character traits highlighted by German and Austrian
informants are their nations’ liveliness, hard work, protectiveness, gentle-
ness, rationality and ability to move forward as well as the role as father:
(38) […] a nation is like / should be like a caring father trying to spark the brains of
his children for being able to establish a consciousness based on moral [sic].
This father should guide his children until they are able to stand on their own
feet and contribute to an appropriate social life with opportunity and toler-
ance. (G, G, 20, M)
With six instantiations in the German L1 sample, father assignations are not
abundant but are three times more frequent than mother assignations. In just
two cases they are explicitly linked to the term “fatherland”, in German: Vaterland,
which is a historically highly loaded term linked to nationalist ideologies
(Townson 1992). More ambivalent characterizations are couched in the form of
an extended, apologetic depiction of an old man with a problematic past who has
lots of experience and is able to give advice to the young generation but is also
“shy” or “shadowy” and appearing (or anxious) to be “not very influential”:
(39) The way Austria stands is like an old man. Bend [sic] back, lots of wrinkles that
show what tolls life took, tired eyes and yet a bright smile, excited what the
future still holds. […] You see, Austria, has been thru [sic] a lot [of ] dark days
and brighter ones. (G, AUST, 22 F)
(40) “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” [= Federal Republic of Germany] as a
metaphor in terms of a human body to me would be a naive old man who tries
30 Andreas Musolff
his best and contributes to society while helping others as much as possible. He
also has a criminal past but fully recovered by now. (G, G, 21, F)
The student writers in their early or mid-twenties convey a critical-but-

sympathetic attitude towards an authority figure of the previous generation whose
weak or dark sides are known to them but are considered to belong to the past.
Unambiguously critical depictions of the national “character” in the German L1
sample refer explicitly to the Nazi-history:
(41) We still carry the heavy load of history on our shoulder, but working together,
taking everyone serious [sic], we can work for a better future. Sometimes, poli-
tics thinks [sic] that they can just ignore a rotten tooth and pretend it doesn’t
exist, but the only way is to amend and address the problem and the needs [sic]
to fix it (e.g. talking about Pegida).4 (G, G, 25, F)
As the reference to current right-wing extremist movements such as Pegida shows,

the Nazi-past of the German nation-person is seen by some respondents as con-
nected with its present-day behavior, and therefore as a responsibility or commit-
ment not to repeat the crimes of the past. Two informants refer to the post-2015
upsurge in immigration but, significantly, derive from it a positive characteriza-
tion of the German nation as a “mixed and colorful ‘person’” (G, G, 21, F) or as an
“integrated” body in which “everyone is accepted and belongs to another, no mat-
ter where they come from” (G, G, 20, F). Whilst ‘serious’ positive, mixed and neg-
ative nation as person characterizations are roughly evenly represented, ironical
or sarcastic examples, which formed a distinct sub-strand in the English L1 sam-
ple, are rare. However, they do resemble the English L1 examples in playing on
national stereotypes of drinking habits, albeit mainly beer-, not tea-related:
(42) [My nation is] a white male holding something typical german [sic], like beer,
Sauerkraut, etc. Dressed in clothing not made in Germany, mostly soccer stuff.
(G, G, 18, F)
4. Comparison
Overall, English and German L1 speakers’ conceptualizations of their nation(s)

as bodies or persons show some significant similarities and contrasts. The most
obvious parallel is the preponderance of the body-concept of the nation state with
4. “Pegida” is a German acronym that stands for Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung
des Abendlandes (‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicisation of the Occident’) and is the
self-chosen name of a far-right wing, nationalist and xenophobic movement in Germany.
a hierarchically ordered anatomy and functional interdependence among the dif-

ferent body parts as its two governing principles. However, in comparison with
the English L1 sample, the German L1 cohort shows a stronger tendency to use
health problem concepts to indicate historical and political topics, especially
those connected with the legacy of Nazism, World War II and right-wing extrem-
ism, usually in a ‘serious’ way (scars, injury, infection). Vis-à-vis this body sce-
nario, those of the nation as body part and as part of ego remain ephemeral,
which is broadly similar to the English L1-cohort.
The two samples differ most significantly in the remaining scenarios. geo-
body, which plays a significant role in the English L1 sample by providing oppor-
tunities for polemical or sarcastic denigration (‘place/region X as the anus,
armpit, etc. of the nation’) but is much less important in the German-L1 sample
and its formulations there serve predominantly to praise or neutrally describe
their referents. The only observable similarity here is a shared preference for
head and heart as the most important organs, of which the latter invites emo-
tional identification, giving rise to expressions of patriotic enthusiasm (my nation
is warm/open hearted, etc.).
On the other hand, the conceptualization of the nation as a person is the
second-ranking scenario in the German L1 sample (third in the English L1 sam-
ple) and gives rise to strong evaluations. They express either enthusiastic praise
for the nation’s friendliness and generosity or criticism of its troubled and
difficult personality. The latter aspect is linked to the historical experience
of Nazism, Holocaust and World Wars, which are portrayed by the conventional
metaphor of a heavy burden on the nation’s shoulder. This perspective,
although not hugely frequent, is characteristic of the German L1 sample, across
both Austrian and German sub-cohorts. It has no equivalent in the English
L1-sample and is articulated in a self-consciously ‘serious’ way. Where it is fore-
grounded (see Example (41)), it is often used to reach a quasi-didactic conclusion,
i.e. of learning from the past for the present. In its implicit uses (Examples (39),
(40) it is euphemistically hinted at in the context of the caricature of the nation as
a grumpy old man. These cases overlap with the relatively few ironical hints at
stereotypes (beer-drinking) that portray the nation as a ridiculous but non-
threatening man. Compared with the explicit problematizations of the Nazi
past, these depictions appear understated. Overall, the statistics of irony (8 occur-
rences) and humor (6) in the German L1 sample are low. Even when combined
with non-ironical criticisms (16), they amount to 30 out of 319 scenario instances,
i.e. just 9% of all scenarios.
32 Andreas Musolff
5. Conclusions
In this chapter I have shown that conceptual variation in response to a metaphor

interpretation task is by no means exceptional and that it can be systematically
related to culture-specific discourse traditions. In general, the nation as body
metaphor is a schematic, cross-culturally accessible mapping, with an apparently
nation-affirmative bias. At this abstract, general level, all respondents process the
metaphor in a similar way, i.e. they recognise it as a metaphor and then start
on the process of enriching the abstract mapping, building interpretative sce-
narios and culture-specific views on the target concept nation. The contrasts
between the English and German L1 samples are manifested at this scenario level
in two ways: as different scenario distribution (e.g. contrasting scenarios in sec-
ond place: geobody vs. person), and by way of pragmatic enrichment, such as
the use of evaluations, irony or sarcasm, and allusions to prominent historical or
current topics.
The culture-specific contrasts presented here need to be further validated,
both quantitatively and qualitatively. Still, they show that the focus on the
‘universal-vs.-relative’ dichotomy, or the ‘gradient’ perspective (universal
body-based schema –> culture-specific variation phenomena) are over-
simplifying. All examples discussed here are body-based, so are in principle uni-
versally interpretable. But at the level of documented interpretations such as those
in this interpretation survey, we can observe distinct conceptual-semantic vari-
ants (“scenarios”). These scenarios in turn function as reference points of plat-
forms for various pragmatic effects which open up the full range of interpretation
variation, involving sociolinguistic and discourse-historical information about
culture- and community-specific preferences in conceptualizing the nation as
body.
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Conceptualising presidential elections
Competing metaphorical models, and alternative
approaches to their critical analysis
Olaf Jäkel
Europa-Universität Flensburg
This contribution investigates the metaphorical conceptualisation of US-

presidential elections. A solid onomasiological metaphor study (cf. Jäkel
2003) brings out alternative and even competing models. One point of this
paper is to decide which approach to the analysis of political metaphor is
better suited for a critical discourse analysis: Steen’s (2008, 2011a) concept of
deliberate metaphor on the one hand, or Charteris-Black’s (2012) purposeful
metaphor on the other hand. This is discussed on the basis of authentic
discourse data from the US-presidential campaign of 2016 and the 2018
midterm elections. Following a concise analysis of some conventional
metaphors instatiating standard alternative models in the public media
domain, Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s uses of metaphor are
compared to results of an investigation of former US-president Barack
Obama’s metaphorical language in a corpus of eight of his major speeches
held between 2008 and 2012 (cf. Jäkel 2012).
Keywords: purposeful/deliberate metaphor, political discourse,

onomasiological metaphor analysis, critical discourse analysis, presidential
elections
1. Introduction
The hypothesis that highly abstract domains of discourse are prone to some expe-
riential grounding via systematic metaphorical mappings from some more con-
crete source domains is one of the central tenets of the Cognitive Theory of
Metaphor, alternatively called Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson
1980; Lakoff 1993; cf. Jäkel 2003). The language of politics certainly constitutes a
highly abstract domain, and thus lends itself to an investigation of the metaphor-
ical use of certain lexemes, which, if systematic, can be analysed as motivated
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.02jak
Conceptualising presidential elections 37
by conceptual metaphors. Such onomasiological metaphor analysis (Jäkel 2003)

therefore can contribute to a cognitively motivated critical discourse analysis of
the language of politics (cf. Jäkel 2012). This contribution will focus on one par-
ticular issue of US-American politics: the presidential elections and midterm elec-
tions, and the language used by politicians and their commentators in the public
media domain to talk about them. It will be argued that based on a solid ono-
masiological analysis, we can find alternative and even competing metaphorical
models of political elections. Apart from well-known examples like the election
as a war, or the election as a crossroads, we will analyse such alternative
conceptualisations of the election as a lawsuit versus the election as a job
interview, as exemplified in authentic discourse data from the US-presidential
campaign of 2016, and the 2018 midterm elections.
One additional theoretical point of this paper is to decide which approach to
the analysis of political metaphor is better suited for a critical discourse analysis:
Steen’s (2008, 2011a, 2011b) concept of deliberate metaphor on the one hand, or
Charteris-Black’s (2011, 2012) purposeful metaphor on the other hand. This will
be discussed on the basis of authentic discourse data from the US-presidential
campaign of 2016, and the 2018 midterm elections. Donald Trump’s and Hillary
Clinton’s uses of metaphor will also be compared to results of an investigation of
former US-president Barack Obama’s metaphorical language in a corpus of eight
of his major speeches held between 2008 and 2012 (cf. Jäkel 2012). The compar-
ison with Obama’s use of metaphor is intended to help in getting a firmer grip
on the issue of deliberateness or purpose of fully contextualised metaphorical
language in a larger corpus (about 44,000 words) of authentic language. All of
the rhetorically motivated metaphors in this investigation have mainly persuasive
functions: e.g., convincing the audience, generating pathos, creating consensus
and confidence, or avoiding precision.
The structure of this paper can be outlined in short like this: I will start
with an analytical section (2.) on some standard alternative metaphors concep-
tualising presidential elections. I will then (3.) interpolate a short theoretical
discussion of the preferred model for the analysis of non-standard metaphors
in political rhetoric as deliberate or purposeful. This will be followed by more
detailed analyses of competing metaphorical models conceptualising presidential
elections, with section (4.) focussing on the 2016 contestants Trump versus Clin-
ton. Section (5.) on Obama’s use of metaphor will include the results from a cor-
pus study of eight of his speeches. The paper will end with a short summary and
conclusion.
38 Olaf Jäkel
2. Conceptualising presidential elections: Some standard alternative

metaphors
In discourse about US-American elections, we can find some highly conventional

metaphors in the context of talking about states and their alleged, predicted or
actual voting results. This section will analyse the four compound nouns or noun
phrases swing state, toss-up state, battleground state, and purple state, all of which
are near-synonyms, and any of which can serve as antonym to the label of safe
state. Safe states have been won by one and the same of the two major parties for
years on end. If this is not the case, any of the four alternative labels mentioned
can be applied. In all of these nominal constructions, the first constituent receives
a metaphorical sense through being combined with the head state as its co-text
(cf. Jäkel 2003: 44, 127). None of these metaphors is creative or novel, but all have
to be regarded instead as utterly conventional ways of talking about elections and
their outcomes.
The examples in this section are all taken from the public news coverage
on television and in newspapers in the run-up to the midterm elections of 2018;
sources are indicated. It will be argued that each of the four linguistic metaphors is
based on a different conceptual model of political elections. Moreover, the under-
lying metaphors carry different implications, which in some cases even contradict
those of competing models. However, it will be argued that none of these ways
of talking about political elections seems to suggest that we are dealing with con-
scious choices made by rhetorically aware speakers. Here are some exemplifica-
tions:
(1) Those swing states are absolutely vital. [CNN, 7/4/2018]
(2) Why Virginia is still a swing state. [NBC Washington, 11/9/2017]
Without having made an exact count, the term swing state (Examples (1), (2)),
which came to be used in the 1960s, is in all likelihood still the most frequently
used of the four terms.1 The underlying conceptual model of swing states sees
elections as a pendulum, and politics as a clockwork. The image-schematic
idea is that of a kind of mechanism which is characterised by some regular motion
to and fro. The mapping of that regular pattern to the target domain of political
elections results in the implication that the outcome of the elections is almost
predictable: Like the pendulum that will swing from one side to the other and
1. This observation is confirmed by a check of the Corpus of Contemporary American English

(COCA), which yields the following frequency counts: swing state(s) 2639, followed by battle-
ground state(s) 1693, purple state(s) 107, and toss-up state(s) 55.
back, the voting results from a swing state will rather swing in the opposite direc-
tion from the one taken in the previous election.
Though denotationally synonymous, the term toss-up state, in comparison,
exemplifies an alternative conceptual metaphor, which conceives of elections as
a lottery, and politics as a gambling game (Examples (3), (4)):
(3) New Mexico is no longer considered a toss-up state. [CNN, 1/17/2018]
(4) Florida now a toss-up. [CNN headline, 4/10/2018]
Motivated by the image of the actual tossing of a coin in order to make a decision,
the idea here is that of sheer luck, and a chance result. In marked contrast to the
previously discussed model, the mapping of the coin flip to the target domain
of political elections results in the implication that the outcome of the elec-
tions is completely unpredictable. The coin flip counts as the very model of unpre-
dictability. Though statistically, both possible outcomes are likely to appear over
time in equal shares, no one is able to predict which outcome will be the next.
The next term, battleground state (Examples (5), (6)) is probably the oldest
label of the four, going back as far as the 1860s:
(5) Some states, like Florida, are perennial battleground states.
[NBC Washington, 11/9/2017]
(6) Virginia was solidly red until 2008, when it became a battleground state.
[NBC Washington, 11/9/2017]
Grounded in a very traditional and established conceptualisation, battleground
states are a linguistic exemplification of the metaphorical model elections as
war, which represents a special case of the well-known conceptual metaphor
politics as war. In the context of that model, political opponents figure as
adversaries, with armies soldiering and fighting in opposed partisan camps. The
rich metaphorical mapping includes hard-fought campaigns, the implications of
which are of elections as an extremely martial enterprise. Again, we will see that
in direct comparison this makes for a clear contrast with the next model.
Of all the four alternatives, the term purple state (Examples (7), (8)) repre-
sents the latest addition to the field, having come into use only after the year 2000.
In 2004, it was even chosen as ‘Word of the year’ by The American Dialect Soci-
ety:
(7) Virginia is no longer a purple state. [Washington Post, 6/12/2017]
(8) Farmsworth said he thinks Virginia is moving in a ‘bluer direction’, but it’s
definitely still a purple state. [Washington Post, 6/12/2017]
40 Olaf Jäkel
This colour symbolism is based on the relatively recent colour coding of electoral
maps since the year 2000, in which states with a majority of votes for the Repub-
lican candidate were coloured in red, while states with a majority for the Demo-
cratic candidate were coloured in blue. If some commentators derive the label
of purple states, the underlying metaphorical model could be described as elec-
tions as painting. While the US-American electoral system in general works
on a ‘winner takes all’ principle, which yields those blue states versus red states
results, a more detailed representation uses maps in which the colour purple is
used to mark some of those unsafe states. The metaphorical mapping from the
source domain of painting includes the possibility of a peaceful blend of red and
blue resulting in some shades of purple, which goes against the ‘either-or’ logic.
What this implies is a much more reconciliatory view, which stands in stark con-
trast to the martial war model inspected above. Maybe it is not too far-fetched
to mention the different shades of purple worn on Joe Biden’s inauguration day
2021 – violet by Vice President Kamala Harris, and magenta by Michelle Obama –
as symbolising unity, reconciliation, and even the promise of bipartisanship.
So far, the analysis of alternative metaphors has revealed fundamental dif-
ferences between conceptual models of political elections. In addition, it has
even identified two contrasting pairs, as far as metaphorical implications are con-
cerned: On the one hand, the model of swing states, with elections as a pen-
dulum, seems to be diametrically opposed to the model of toss-up states, with
elections as a lottery, as the first implies predictability whereas the second
implies unpredictability of political election results. On the other hand, the model
of battleground states, which conceptualises elections as war, contrasts with
the model of purple states, which conceptualises elections as painting, in that
the first supports a rather martial view of political elections, whereas the second
favours a much more reconciliatory view.
All of this said, however, it should not be concluded that any of these expres-
sions will, under normal circumstances, be chosen deliberately or on purpose. As
stated above, all four expressions are denotational equivalents of each other which
can be used as near synonyms. In fact, no basic difference in use depending on
context (e.g. different states, different majority margins, different political stances
or convictions of commentators or their media outlets) could be detected. More-
over, the four expressions can all be regarded as highly conventional ways of talk-
ing, which may be chosen by speakers or commentators without any awareness
of their metaphorical underpinnings. One further argument to support this claim
lies in the fact that in the discourse of political commentaries, the linguistic real-
isations of alternative metaphorical models can very often be seen to appear in
close proximity as mixed metaphors, as the following Examples (9), (10) reveal:
(9) Battle for the toss-up states. [CNN headline, 10/14/2008]

(10) Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have always been covered as battleground
states despite them voting blue, but 2016 was the first time they actually
swung. [NBC Washington, 11/9/2017]
The slightly dated Example (9) proves that more than one of these metaphors –
here: the war plus the gambling game type – can be combined in the minimal
space of a short headline, and have been used without any problems with this mix
of metaphors for more than ten years now. Notice that Example (6) above also
combined two different metaphors, with instantiations of the painting plus the
war model. The little story told in the slightly longer Excerpt (10) even features
a collection of three different metaphors, unabashedly combining the war model
with its alternatives of painting and pendulum. The normality of such mixed
metaphors proves that in the cases analysed so far, we have been dealing with
standard alternative conventional metaphors.
3. Deliberate or purposeful? How to analyse metaphors in political

rhetoric
Before we continue to analyse the use of metaphors in political discourse with a

view to speakers consciously trying to create certain rhetorical effects, a short the-
oretical interpolation is due. With the rhetorically aware speaker we are approach-
ing a field of metaphor use that was the traditional homeground of classical
rhetoric and the Aristotelean theory of metaphor (see Jäkel 2003), which is not
exactly what the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) focussed as its centre of interest. This, instead, was the systematic analysis
of conventional metaphorical expressions and idioms giving voice to underlying
systems of conceptual metaphors. The metaphorical language was so unspectacu-
lar and normal that in most cases its metaphoricity went unnoticed by both speak-
ers and addressees – until exposed to analysis by Cognitive linguists following
Lakoff and Johnson (1980).
In recent years, however, a kind of backshift has been noticeable which,
though still firmly rooted in the Cognitive approach, focuses again on the con-
scious use of well-chosen metaphors and their possible or intended rhetorical
functions. Among other, less interesting proposals, two contributions deserve
to be mentioned here: Gerard Steen’s so-called deliberate metaphor approach
(2008, 2011a), and Jonathan Charteris-Black’s alternative approach to purposeful
metaphor (2011, 2012).
42 Olaf Jäkel
When Steen first came up with his notion of deliberate metaphor, it could
be seen as a welcome supplement to the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor. This
view was supported by definitions of deliberate metaphor like the following (Steen
2008: 222): “A metaphor is used deliberately when it is expressly meant to change
the addressee’s perspective on the referent or topic that is the target of the
metaphor, by making the addressee look at it from a different conceptual domain
or space, which functions as a conceptual source.” While this and similar state-
ments could at least be read with a focus on the speaker’s intention to influence
the audience, “meaning to change the addressee’s perspective”, Steen as the sole
copyright holder of the notion of deliberate metaphor used later publications to
shift his definition away from this reading, which may not have been what he had
in mind in the first place. Instead, he has replaced it by now explicitly focussing
on the actual addressee’s attention and way of processing a certain metaphor, as in
the following, more recent definition (Steen 2011a: 84): “[A] metaphor is deliber-
ate when addressees must pay attention to the source domain as an independent
conceptual domain (or space or category) that they are instructed to use to think
about the target of the metaphor.”
If the addressee is somehow forced to (“must”) process a metaphor con-
sciously by actively paying “attention to the source domain as an independent
conceptual domain”, for that metaphor to count as deliberate, we are no longer
talking about the speaker’s alleged intentions, but about the recipient’s side of the
communication. There is a methodological problem here, as in discourse data
there is hardly ever unambiguous evidence for any addressee’s way of processing
an incoming metaphor. Moreover, his publications show no sign that Steen him-
self has ever taken pains to investigate the actual processing of metaphor by other
means than recourse to discourse data. Theoretically at least, this could be done
by testing recipients under controlled conditions – maybe by some sophisticated
neuro-imaging technologies, or, in the absence of these, by at least systematically
asking informants to reflect consciously about their processing of metaphors,
however unreliable this would be.
For somebody rooted firmly in the Cognitive approach (cf. Jäkel 2003) look-
ing for a pragmatic supplement of the onomasiological metaphor analysis, this
development made the deliberate metaphor approach unattractive as a method
of (critically) analysing conscious metaphor use by rhetorically aware speakers.
Instead, I will now turn to Jonathan Charteris-Black’s approach to purposeful
metaphor, which offers itself as a more attractive and viable alternative. To amend
the Cognitive approach, I share the general view expressed by Charteris-Black
(2011: 247): “[A]nother dimension of metaphor that is revealed by Critical
Metaphor Analysis … is the way that metaphor selection is governed by the
rhetorical aim of persuasion.” Based on this principle, Charteris-Black’s definition
of purposeful metaphor is as follows (2012: 2): “I propose the term ‘purposeful

metaphor’ for a theory of metaphor in communication where there is linguistic
and contextual evidence of purpose.”
In contrast to the more recent versions of deliberateness outlined by Steen, this
definition and notion of purposefulness in metaphor use proposed by Charteris-
Black seems more useful and promising for critical discourse analysts interested
in investigating conscious metaphor use in authentic discourse data. Why this
instrument is particularly prone for application to political discourse such as
investigated in this paper is argued in more detail in the following explanation by
Charteris-Black (2012: 1): “‘[P]urposeful metaphor’ contributes to an explanation
of metaphor use in political and legal discourse, and other persuasive genres. Lin-
guistic evidence for purposefulness is in the interaction between textually com-
plex use of metaphor and contextual features such as political purpose.”
The “textually complex use of metaphor” indicating purposefulness can make
use of the very same indicators used in Steen et al. (2010), then still for delib-
erateness. These indicators included truly novel metaphors (cf. Cameron 2003)
as well as explicit similes (cf. Steen 2008: ‘direct metaphors’). And, as even con-
ventional (‘indirect’) metaphors can be used on purpose (‘deliberately’), further
indicators are found in the occurrence of numerous metaphorical expressions as
instances of one conceptual metaphor, like in reoccurring metaphors, local clusters
of metaphors, or creative extensions of established conventional metaphors, plus
emphatically poetic metaphors.
Equipped with this toolkit, the following sections (4 and 5) will exemplify the
use of purposeful metaphor as an instrument of critical discourse analysis.
4. Competing metaphorical models: Trump versus Clinton
In the context of their 2016 election campaign for president of the United States,
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as the two contestants displayed some strik-
ing uses of metaphor that can only be analysed as purposeful in the sense
explained above. The general persuasive purpose is obvious: in order to get
elected, convincing voters to vote for you is required of the candidates. Focussing
on the competing models of political elections explicitly voiced by the con-
testants, the analysis in this section will zoom in on one “textually complex use
of metaphor” (Charteris-Black 2012: 1) from each of the two candidates, starting
with Donald Trump:
(11) On election day, the politicians stand trial before the people. The voters are
the jury. Their ballots are the verdict. [Donald Trump 06/22/2016]
44 Olaf Jäkel
The unique metaphorical model displayed in this passage (11) is one that concep-
tualises the election as a lawsuit. The metaphorical mappings from the source
domain of lawsuits to the target domain of the presidential election feature
the political candidates as the accused, standing trial. If we remember that dur-
ing his entire campaign, Trump staged himself as the anti-establishment candi-
date who ran as a non-politician, it may dawn on us that somehow he manages to
ingeniously count himself out from “the politicians” having to stand trial, leaving
only Hillary Clinton as the accused.
The metaphorical mapping further includes a particular role for the voters,
who figure as the jury, giving their verdict. The logical implication of this lawsuit
model has it that “the verdict” can only be negative, against the candidate found
guilty. Again, this of course needs to be seen in the larger context (cf. Charteris-
Black 2012) of Trump’s campaign, in which he was constantly attacking his oppo-
nent Hillary Clinton for illegal actions or even criminal offences, and holding out
the prospect of putting her to trial as soon as he was elected for president. Trump’s
election rallies notoriously culminated in his audience joining in long “Lock her
up!” chants, which would be directed by Trump as cheerleader indulging in that
eerie celebration.
As can be witnessed here, the general persuasive purpose of any candidate of
getting elected took a very particular form in Donald Trump’s campaign. More
than positively trying to convince voters to vote for him, he spent much of his
energy in the negative attempt at demolishing his opponent’s credibility as a seri-
ous politician. Today we know that he succeeded. What is remarkable, though, is
how well thought out, how elaborate and how purposeful the use of Trump’s cen-
tral metaphorical model of political elections was.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign also featured a central metaphorical model of
political elections, albeit one completely different from Trump’s. Talking
about the presidential campaign in the run-up to the televised presidential
debates, she came up with the following passage:
(12) It’s like a big job interview. You’re hearing from two people that you might
hire. And I, frankly, think it’s better for us to have an economy where you
hear ‘You’re hired’, instead of ‘You‘re fired’. [Hillary Clinton 08/03/2016]
The special metaphorical model displayed in this passage (12) is one that concep-
tualises the election as a job interview. For the conceptual analysis it does not
really make a difference that due to the “like” particle, the metaphor is introduced
as an explicit simile (in Steen’s terminology, a ‘direct’ metaphor). The metaphor-
ical mappings from the source domain of job interview to the target domain of
the presidential election feature the political candidates as the applicants for
the biggest job advertised. The role reserved for the voters in this mapping is that
of the bosses, or at the very least, the heads of human resources, who are in charge
of deciding. Their aim, implied in the logic of this metaphorical model, is hiring
the best qualified candidate for that most important job.
In marked contrast to her opponent, Hillary Clinton of course takes care to
point out that when it comes to qualifications for the job as US president, nobody
is better suited than her, who has long experience in public office, including her
service to the country as foreign secretary under President Obama. While this
is the positive advertisement to support her application for the big job, she also
includes a jab at her opponent in the passage analysed, linking her vision of a
growing economy with an allusion to Trump’s reality-TV appearance as boss in
“The Apprentice”. In that popular reality-TV show, her opponent would notori-
ously end each episode on the note of “You‘re fired!”. This is now held against him
as a presidential candidate, who if elected would be responsible for a national
economy in need of more employment rather than less.
Even if Hillary Clinton’s election campaign, in comparison to her opponent’s,
was more based on pointing out her own factual knowledge, international expe-
rience and, therefore, focused on actual qualifications, the choice of her central
metaphorical model of political elections was by no means less rhetorically
clever than that of Donald Trump. Even if in hindsight we know that she lost
the election against him, the metaphorical model proposed by Hillary Clinton
was just as well thought out, elaborate, and purposeful. In both Examples ((11),
(12)) analysed in this section, the evidence of purposeful metaphor use lies in the
elaborate local cluster of linguistic metaphors motivated by the same conceptual
model. Moreover, both conceptual metaphors are quite novel. In Clinton’s case
(12), the evidence is even strengthened by the use of an explicit simile.
5. Obama’s alternative model
In this final analytical section, two things will be done. First, in order to widen
the perspective after inspecting the two competing models used by Trump and
Clinton against each other, we will bring in another metaphorical model of pres-
idential elections, which was employed by former President Barack Obama
when he was running for his second term in office. Second, in contrast to the
models analysed in Section 4, Obama’s election model can be analysed as an
integral part of a relatively conventional conceptual metaphor he favoured and
purposefully exploited in many of his speeches. In addition, the comparison with
Obama’s use of metaphor is intended to help in getting a firmer grip on the issue
of deliberateness or purpose of fully contextualised metaphorical language in a
larger corpus (~ 44,000 words) of authentic language, as for this I can draw on
46 Olaf Jäkel
my own investigation of eight speeches held by Barack Obama between 2008 and
2012.
To begin with, here is Obama’s central metaphorical model of presidential
elections, which he proclaimed towards the end of his convention speech in
September 2012, when he was running for his second term:
(13a) And on every issue, the choice you face won’t just be between two can-
didates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for
America, […].
(13b) The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place. […]
(13c) America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that
now. Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is
longer, but we travel it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind.
We pull each other up. […] we keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon,
knowing that Providence is with us, and that we are surely blessed to be
citizens of the greatest nation on Earth.
[Obama 9/2012, Convention Speech, including the final passage]
The metaphorical model displayed in this passage (13) is one that conceptualises
the election as a crossroads, very much in keeping with Obama’s favourite
journey metaphor (cf. Jäkel 2012). The metaphorical mappings from the source
domain of a journey to the target domain of the presidential election feature
the political candidates as competing scouts, offering to lead in the right direction.
The role assigned to the voters by this model is that of travellers, choosing
between different paths (Example (13a)).
Next (Examples (13b), (c)), we find Obama offering himself as the inspired
leader, heroically advocating the more difficult path. Notice the religious over-
tones, including a Biblical allusion (to Matthew 7: 13; cf. Jäkel 2003: 278), also
expressing care for the weaker travellers and mutual support, not to forget hope
for a better future that lies ahead in the distance. In all likelihood, this speaker
shares the general persuasive purpose of all candidates to get (re)elected. In
comparison with Trump’s and Clinton’s rhetorical strategies, however, we may
notice that presidential candidate Obama, without overtly denouncing alternative
options (which figure as alternative paths to travel), manages to model himself as
prophet, wise and caring leader, and heroic scout. All of this is achieved by means
of another well-chosen, elaborate, and purposeful metaphorical model of politi-
cal elections.
If we continue the comparison, Obama’s election model shows more strik-
ing differences. The investigation of eight important political speeches held by
Obama between 2008 and 2012 reveals that his election model forms an integral
part of his alltime favourite, the conceptual metaphor of politics / political

progress as a journey. This metaphor is already featured in Obama’s Victory
Speech from November 4, 2008 (cf. Jäkel 2012):
(14a) The road ahead will be long.
(14b) Our climb will be steep.
(14c) We may not get there in one year or even in one term.
(14d) But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we
will get there.
(14e) I promise you, we as a people will get there. [Obama 2008, Victory Speech]
In a critical discourse analysis (Jäkel 2012: 263f.), I analysed Obama’s elaborate use
(cf. the examples in 14) of the rather conventional journey or path metaphor as
purposefully chosen to attune his listeners to strenuous long-term efforts, which
are supposed to be worthwhile in view of the common goal that can be reached.
The rhetorical ‘surplus value’ of this conceptual metaphor progress as journey
(cf. Lakoff 1993: 206–08; Jäkel 2003: 263–64) lies in the fact that the speaker, rely-
ing on the persuasive power of the metaphor, can avoid specifying concrete and
particular goals, which might jeopardise the miraculous consent of the stereo-
typical onwards and upwards metaphor for progress. The suggestive pathos
of progress – but where? – shows that purposeful metaphors cannot only be
employed to highlight certain aspects, but also to hide – in this case, in order to
avoid precision.
Further elaborations of his favourite journey metaphor can be found in vir-
tually every speech by Obama. I will quote two more exemplary passages (15),
(16), both from his first Inaugural Address, held on January 20, 2009:
(15a) Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.
(15b) It has not been the path for the fainthearted […].
(15c) [I]t has been the risk-takers […] who have carried us up the long, rugged
path toward prosperity and freedom. […]
(15d) This is the journey we continue today. [Obama 2009, Inaugural Address]
Both Examples (15) and (16) show elaborations of the journey metaphor that
repeatedly point out the strenuousness of the path (Examples (15b), (c)) as well
as carrying religious undertones (Example (16c)) we already encountered above.
(16a) Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested, we
refused to let this journey end,
48 Olaf Jäkel
(16b) that we did not turn back nor did we falter,

(16c) and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us
(16d) we carried forth that great gift of freedom
(16e) and delivered it safely to future generations.
[Obama 2009, Inaugural Address, final passage]
In Example (16), we finally witness a creative extension of the journey metaphor
as a cross-generational relay race (cf. Jäkel 2012: 269), in which the precious
freedom of the target domain politics (Example (16d)) figures as the baton
(Example (16e)). As in the previous Section 4, all of the Examples (13), (14), (15),
(16) analysed in this Section 5 clearly indicated the purposeful use of metaphors
through elaborate local clusters of linguistic metaphors motivated by the same
underlying conceptual model. What distinguishes Obama’s model from those
analysed in Section 4 above is the fact that both Trump and Clinton employ
rather novel metaphors, whereas Obama purposefully elaborates and extends a
conventional conceptual metaphor. As argued, however, in all three cases, there
can be no doubt about the purposeful use of metaphor.
After analysing some exemplary passages, I will shortly summarise the results
of my own corpus study investigating Barack Obama’s general use of metaphors.
The corpus included the following eight political speeches held by Obama
between 2008 and 2012:
– Victory Speech (Obama 11 / 2008)
– Inaugural Address (Obama 1 / 2009)
– Prague Speech (Obama 4 / 2009)
– Cairo Speech (Obama 6 / 2009)
– State of the Union Address (Obama 1 / 2010)
– Convention Speech (Obama 9 / 2012)
In total, this yielded a corpus of about 44,000 words. The investigation made use
of a simplified model of the “MIPVU” metaphor identification procedure propa-
gated by Steen et al. (2010), with a manual search of the complete corpus, identi-
fying and counting all linguistic metaphors. The metaphor frequencies found in
the eight individual speeches are given in the following list:
– Victory Speech (11 / 2008) 3.84%
– Inaugural Address (1 / 2009) 5.64%
– Prague Speech (4 / 2009) 6.00%
– Cairo Speech (6 / 2009) 2.44%

– State of the Union Address (1 / 2010) 4.37%
– Convention Speech (9 / 2012) 3.17%
→ Corpus average: 4.36%
The investigation of Obama’s speeches resulted in a general metaphor frequency
of 4.36% (2.44–6.00%). The share of purposeful metaphors however remains
debatable: Similes were extremely rare (totalling two in the whole corpus), as
were other ‘direct metaphors‘ (there was one single case of parable). What could
be detected as other potentially purposeful metaphors were many reoccurring
metaphors, several local clusters of metaphors, sometimes including creative
extensions, and some poetic and novel metaphors.
While in this paper I have focused on metaphor, it has to be said that Obama’s
speeches are characterised by the ingenuous use and combination of all kinds of
rhetorical devices, including not only metaphor, but also metonymy, pairs and tri-
ads of structures, etc. (cf. Jäkel 2012). All of these have mainly persuasive func-
tions, e.g., convincing the audience, generating pathos, creating consensus and
confidence, avoiding precision.
6. Summary and conclusion
After this tour of detailed metaphor studies from the realm of US-American polit-
ical discourse with a focus on the target domain of (presidential) elections, which
was amended by the results from a medium size corpus study of former President
Obama’s use of metaphor, a summary and conclusion is in place to round off this
investigation.
First of all, a solid onomasiological metaphor analysis (cf. Jäkel 2003) has
shown that in public media discourse, political elections are conceptualised by
means of a number of alternative conventional metaphors. Although these can
be regarded as denotational equivalents, they display certain differences in their
metaphorical focus: aspects that are highlighted or hidden. Methodically we may
conclude that investigating the role of conceptual metaphor in the representation
of political events by means of onomasiological metaphor analysis can contribute
to Critical Discourse Analysis.
Studying purposeful uses of metaphors for presidential elections in political
speeches reveals particular rhetorical functions/purposes: e.g., convincing the au-
dience, generating pathos, creating consensus and confidence, avoiding precision.
50 Olaf Jäkel
While in general, what has been discovered here are different realisations of the
mainly persuasive function of metaphor, we found that it is not only the metaphor-
ical highlighting that can be performed purposefully, but also the hiding.
Thus, in investigations of political discourse, especially if focussing on the
use of metaphor, a critical approach is needed. In this context, the analysis of
purposeful metaphors in authentic (political) discourse in particular can make
a valuable contribution to an Applied and Critical Cognitive Linguistics. It may
be concluded that combining the onomasiological analysis of metaphor with the
investigation of other rhetorical devices as well as with a thorough study of textual
structures seems most promising. In these analyses, context should of course be
taken into account.
If it was claimed a while ago that “the theory of deliberate metaphor still
needs more deliberation, discussion, and eventually, research” (Steen 2011b: 59),
the same surely holds today for the analysis of purposeful metaphor. The studies
and analyses presented here are meant to contribute to this enterprise. Investigat-
ing the purposeful use of metaphor can be regarded as a welcome amendment to
the onomasiological approach based on the Cognitive theory of metaphor.
References
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Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2011). Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor
(second edition). Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Metaphor and the Social World 2(1), pp. 1–21.
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last accessed 10/06/2022].
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Anwendung in Modell-Analysen der Diskursbereiche Geistestätigkeit, Wirtschaft,
Wissenschaft und Religion. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač.
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critical cognitive linguistics. In: Alina Kwiatkowska (Ed.), Texts and Minds: Papers in
Cognitive Poetics and Rhetoric (pp. 259–273). Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.
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Metaphor and Thought (pp. 202–251). 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Steen, Gerard (2008). The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of
metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol 23, pp. 213–241.
Steen, Gerard (2011a). From three dimensions to five steps: The value of deliberate metaphor.
metaphorik.de 21, pp. 83–111.
Steen, Gerard (2011b). The contemporary theory of metaphor – now new and improved!
Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9(1), pp. 26–64.
Steen, Gerard J., Aletta G. Dorst, Berenike J. Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr &
Tryntje Pasma (2010). A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to
MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Opening the thinkgates?
The discourse dynamics of migration metaphors
in online debates
Monika Reif
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU)
This corpus study investigates the uptake and (non-)continuation of

metaphors and metaphor scenarios related to migration/migrants in news
reader comment sections of selected British broadsheets and tabloids. It is
shown how scenarios are modified and aspects of the source domain
foregrounded/backgrounded in order to serve the argumentative interests
of the respective writers. At the same time, potential correlations between
specific conceptual metaphors and argumentative topoi are analysed, with a
particular focus on mixed metaphors. It is argued that the combinations of
conceptual metaphors found in instances of mixed metaphor often create
cognitive dissonance, but that the wish for dramatic effect through
exaggeration appears to justify the merger of two seemingly incompatible
metaphors. The argumentative aim thus seems to be more important than
the internal coherence of the mixed metaphor itself. With regard to the use
of concrete metaphorical linguistic expressions, the corpus data further
reveal that language users repeatedly draw on specific lexical items linked to
a restricted area of the source domain. It is not surprising, therefore, that
the discourse surrounding the topic of migration comes across as highly
conventionalised at times, especially within socio-political echo chambers.
Keywords: migration discourse, news reader comments, Critical Discourse

Analysis, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, mixed metaphors, argumentation
1. Introductory remarks
The unprecedented number of people crossing the Mediterranean to seek pro-

tection under the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention has turned into a highly salient
and contentious socio-political issue in many European countries, including the
U.K., Germany, Greece, Italy and Hungary, to name just a few. Especially in the
U.K., where the Brexit debate has been inextricably linked with the immigration
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.03rei
Discourse dynamics of migration metaphors 53
debate due to the fact that both touch on ‘big’ national issues such as parliamen-
tary sovereignty, mobility rights, economic prosperity and national security (cf.
Cap 2019), images of overcrowded boats and refugee camps have dominated the
front pages of national newspapers ever since the pre-referendum phase.
Given the recent, disconcerting rise of anti-migrant sentiments in various
European countries – a development which has been found to go hand-in-hand
with an increase in political support for right-wing populist parties such as UKIP
in the U.K. and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany (cf. Sola 2018;
Dennison & Geddes 2019) – the media coverage of the “migration crisis” has
become an object of much interest to human rights organisations and migration
policy institutes (e.g. ARTICLE 19 2003; ICAR 2005, 2012; Oxfam 2007; UNHCR
2015; The Council of Europe 2017; Threadgold 2009). Their main aim is to inves-
tigate why migration is increasingly perceived as a challenge for national-cultural
identities, a danger to public order, a threat to domestic and labour market stabil-
ity and an imposition on the welfare state.
Concomitantly, a considerable upsurge in publications on the so-called
“European migration crisis” and its impacts could be witnessed in various
research fields: Political scientists and sociologists seeking to explain the recent
rise of right-wing populism in Europe; psychologists and cognitive scientists aim-
ing to understand more thoroughly the determinants of attitudes towards refugees
and migrants within their host communities; and linguists and cultural studies
scholars critically analysing the verbal and pictorial representation of refugees in
the traditional news media, the social media and political speeches/documents,
in order to establish possible media effects on “the society”.
There seems to be broad consensus across the disciplines that the press has
been playing a central role in framing the arrival of refugees to the European
shores as a “crisis” (although significant regional and institutional differences
as well as event-related shifts1 can be attested). What has been repeatedly criti-
cised is the frequent use of potentially discriminatory metaphors such as a tidal
wave of or an invasion by refugees, the blurring of boundaries between con-
cepts such as ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘economic migrant’,2 a disproportion
1. For instance, while the photograph of the drowned refugee child Aylan Kurdi turned the
migrant crisis into a refugee crisis (Parker 2018), prompting humanitarian responses world-
wide, the media coverage of the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, sparked a
wave of anti-migrant sentiments.
2. Following the BBC terminology, I will use the term “migrant” in this paper to refer to “all
people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group
includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee
status, as well as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to
rule are economic migrants.” (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46722157)
54 Monika Reif
between (conservative) politicians’ voices and refugees’ voices in news reports, a

high visibility of the stereotype of the ‘threatening young male’ in media images,
fearmongering through vague and poorly founded predictions concerning the
numbers of new arrivals (e.g. millions of displaced), and the use of the pronomi-
nal dichotomy us vs. them, leading to othering of the out-group.3
Within the field of linguistics, two complementary research strands with par-
tially shared objectives have established themselves when it comes to researching
migration discourses. The first one is rooted in the tradition of Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA), including the Discourse-Historical Approach, and focuses exten-
sively on argumentation in anti-immigration discourses. The second one draws
on the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (CL), in particular Conceptual
Metaphor and Conceptual Blending Theory, and aims to uncover naturalised
ideological patterns in the representation of migrants and migration.4 Both
approaches seek to investigate the complex relationship between language use,
mental representations and societal structures (cf. Hart 2015b; Dirven,
Polzenhagen & Wolf 2007). However, while CL sees itself as a primarily descrip-
tive discipline interested in finding out more about the interaction between lan-
guage and human cognition, CDA clearly intends to be interventionist,
emphasising the social responsibility of academia to unveil latent ideologies, espe-
cially instances of misrepresentation and discrimination, in public discourses.
The past decade has witnessed an increased incorporation of CL constructs into
critical discourse studies and vice versa (e.g. Cap 2019; Charteris-Black 2006;
El Refaie 2001; Gabrielatos & Baker 2008; Hart 2015a; KhosraviNik 2009, 2014;
Musolff 2015; Parker 2015; Petersson & Kainz 2017; Philo et al. 2013; Santa Ana
1999; Semino 2008), as well as the publication of several discussion papers explic-
itly outlining potential synergy effects of an “alliance” between CDA and CL (e.g.
Stockwell 2001; Hart 2015b, 2018 & 2019; Musolff 2012b).
Methodologically, the use of corpus linguistic techniques seems to have
become a standard in critical approaches to discourse, particularly in the analysis
of mass media texts (cf. Baker et al. 2008). Since wider patterns such as argu-
mentative topoi or highly context-sensitive features such as irony cannot be easily
detected through quantitative statistics like frequency distributions or collocate
3. In line with Richardson (2007: 7), the underlying view of the function of journalism in this
paper is that “it exists to enable citizens to better understand their lives and their position(s) in
the world”, and that aims such as entertainment, PR or even profit should always come second.
Furthermore, journalistic ethics should inform both “an ethical process of newsgathering and
an ethical product in the form of the news itself ” (ibid.: 83).
4. For an application of CL approaches other than Conceptual Metaphor/Blending Theory to
texts on the topic of migration, see for example Hart’s (2011a,b) papers on construal operations
and force-interactive patterns in immigration discourses.
counts, corpus-assisted discourse analysis usually involves a combination of

quantitative and qualitative methods. The latter allow the researcher to take into
account the larger text-internal co-text as well as intertextual references and socio-
political contexts when examining and interpreting concordance lines. With
regard to the topic of migration, the predominant objects of linguistic investi-
gation have been mass media texts belonging to the genres of news reports/
feature articles/opinion pieces, and political speeches/interviews. Notable excep-
tions include Bennett's (2016) study on politicians' tweets in the online debate on
migration in the U.K., as well as Musolff 's (2015) analysis of the language of reader
comments as documented in online blogs and discussion fora.
News reader comment sections, which have evolved into an engrained part of
the digital news sphere in the U.K. and other countries, are also the primary genre
of interest to the present study. The reception of this form of user-generated con-
tent by news professionals, media communication researchers and political scien-
tists can be described as highly ambivalent. On the positive side, the idea of user
comment spaces is appreciated for having the potential to enhance deliberative
processes5 by opening up new opportunities for citizens to engage in democra-
tic dialogue (Ben-David & Soffer 2019; Manosevitch & Walker 2009; Rosenberry
2005). Such interactive mechanisms allow readers to share their (subjective) con-
cerns and opinions and to submit their expertise and testimonies from personal
experience to content provided by professional journalists. This could, at least
theoretically, result in a multiplicity of perspectives and diversity of opinions that
can rarely be found in a single news article (Ben-David & Soffer 2019; Gastil 2008;
Manosevitch & Walker 2009; Ryfe 2005), including voices that might otherwise
be filtered or blocked by the gate-keeping mechanisms of traditional media. Thus,
in an ideal scenario, public engagement in deliberative online fora – if it adheres
to the principles of Habermas’ discursive ethics – may eventually lead to better-
informed and more consensus-oriented political decision-making.
The reality seems to look slightly different (and darker), though: Quite a
few discussion fora and comment sections have gained a “dubious reputation for
giving voice to strongly polemical discourses or hate-speech” (Musolff 2015: 41),
especially in debates touching upon sensitive issues such as migration or Brexit.6
5. Habermas is probably the most prominent defender of deliberative (or discursive) democ-
racy, a system in which public deliberation and consensus are central elements to community
problem solving and political decision-making. Advocates of deliberative democracy hoped
that the internet might be able to provide new platforms for an improved public sphere.
6. The American journalist Leonard Pitts Jr. even goes so far as to describe online comment
sections as “havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the
tattered remnants of our propriety” (Pitts 2010).
56 Monika Reif
Depending on the type of platform/newspaper and the extent of modera-

tion/gate-keeping exerted by the responsible institution, one encounters varying
levels of what has been loosely termed “negatively marked online behaviour
(NMOB)” (cf. Hardaker 2017) such as aggressive argumentation, inflammatory
language and trolling.7 Furthermore, these kinds of online platforms have the ten-
dency of turning into echo chambers in which users’ existing views are ampli-
fied by “communication and repetition inside a closed system” (Butler & Halpern
2020: 169). The question has been rightly raised by various researchers, therefore,
if and to what extent such user discussion fora (on news sites and on social media
platforms like Facebook and Twitter) do actually encourage constructive discus-
sion leading to informed political opinion formation (see, for example, Braun &
Gillespie 2011; Bucher 2019; Hermida & Thurman 2007; Manosevitch & Walker
2009; Rowe 2015b; Ruiz et al. 2011). Warnings have even been voiced by authors
such as Lee (2005) regarding a potential “normalization” of flaming, meaning that
a person who is getting used to reading offensive and discriminatory comments
will eventually consider these comments as unmarked and “normal”, which on
the long run might turn flaming into less salient and even acceptable behaviour
within the (online) community (cf. also Rosenberg 2017).
A similar danger resides in recurring conceptual metaphors within the migra-
tion debate: For one thing, metaphors are often part of blatant flaming, for
instance when migrants are explicitly referred to as “vermin” or “illegal aliens”.
But bias might also be activated implicitly,8 through continuous exposure to
more subtly discriminatory conceptual metaphors such as migration is a nat-
ural disaster, migration is an invasion, migrants are animals or nations
are containers (whose borders need protection because the container might
implode due to an overwhelming inflow from the outside and culture clashes on
the inside). The lexical choices made by the writers – choices between literal and
metaphorical expressions, choices between competing metaphors9 – do not only
reflect the authors’ own ideologies and intentions, but may also contribute to the
7. Various explanations have been put forward for why flaming seems to occur more fre-
quently in computer-mediated communication than in face-to-face communication: reduced
social cues in online fora leading to de-individuation and anonymity; the salience of particular
social groups in discussion fora that display a high level of in-group homogeneity and a ten-
dency to polarize within echo chambers; a different set of behavioural norms associated with
the computing sub-culture in general (cf., for example, Lea et al. 1992; Garimella et al. 2018).
8. Implicit and explicit biases are regarded as related yet distinct concepts, the difference
between the two centring on levels of awareness (Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and
Ethnicity 2013).
9. As Eubanks (2000: 26–27) phrases it, metaphors are always “in conversation with conform-
ing and contrasting literal concepts and metaphors”.
formation of (negative) short- and long-term mental representations on the part

of the recipients.
In the present study, the use of metaphorical language in reader comment
sections dealing with issues of migration in the online editions of the Guardian,
the BBC, the Daily Mail and The Sun/Sunday Express will be examined. My
main area of interest is the uptake, continuation and (argumentative) function
of metaphorical expressions and conceptual metaphors in news reader contribu-
tions, for several reasons. Firstly, a positive correlation between metaphor use in
the news articles and metaphor use in the respective reader comments would be
yet another indicator that metaphors shape the public discourse on and percep-
tion of migration; in the case of discriminatory metaphors, this would implicate
that the news discourse possesses the potential to exacerbate negative attitudes
towards the out-group.10 Secondly, comment data yield evidence on how the use
of metaphors by journalists and politicians is received by their audience. It is
not uncommon for readers to start a meta-discussion on the acceptability of cer-
tain metaphors and the question of deliberate vs. non-deliberate11 metaphor use.
Thirdly, instances of (non-)continuation of certain metaphor scenarios, mixed
metaphor and metaphor re-contextualisation can provide valuable insights into
argumentative strategies employed in the migration debate and might, at the same
time, contribute to theory-building in the field of metaphor studies.
2. Analysing metaphors in dynamic, computer-mediated discourse:

Critical Discourse Analysis, conceptual blending and metaphor
shifting
For the present study of metaphorical language use in reader comments and news
articles on the topic of migration, an appropriate theoretical framework needs
10. Of course, we can never be entirely sure if the metaphor in the comment was actually trig-
gered by the metaphor in the article, since further contexts (e.g. previous private face-to-face
conversations on the topic; input from further news reports/opinion pieces; the wider political
discourse) may also have influenced the writer’s output. However, since mass media texts reach
a large segment of the population and (partly) also determine the private discourse on migra-
tion, the metaphor at hand – if conventionalised – may at least have played an indirect role.
11. According to Steen (2017) and Reijnierse et al. (2017), deliberate metaphors draw attention,
in their production or reception, to the source domain as a separate domain: “A metaphor is
potentially deliberate when the source domain of the metaphor is part of the referential mean-
ing of the utterance in which it is used” (Reijnierse et al. 2017: 137). Steen (2016) further argues
that in the case of mixed (i.e. adjacent and sometimes conflicting) metaphors, at least one delib-
erate metaphor may be needed for the phenomenon to be recognised.
58 Monika Reif
to be set up which allows for linguistic, socio-cultural and cognitive aspects to

be integral parts (cf. also Cameron 1999: 4). Let us start with a closer look at
the twofold aim of critical discourse studies. It is an essential tenet of critical
approaches to (public) discourse that linguistic structures and strategies are not
just “textual objects”, but constitutive forms of “sociocultural practice” (Van Dijk
1993: 96). The study of discourse should thus involve both a descriptive account
of the patterns and strategies used and an analysis of the dynamic relationships
between these textual properties and the relevant structures of their cognitive,
socio-cultural and discourse-historical contexts (ibid.: 96). Linguistic data are val-
ued as an ‘access gate’ to prevalent ideologies within certain social communi-
ties. At the same time, written and spoken texts, especially in public domains,
are assumed to play an essential role in the (re)production, legitimisation and
resistance of ideologies, given that the acquisition of ideologies (and also preju-
dices) happens discursively to a considerable extent (e.g. Van Dijk 1993, 2000b,
2015; Fairclough 1995; Fairclough & Wodak 1997; Wodak 2001; Hart 2018). In the
CDA approach, language is not assumed to be powerful on its own, but rather to
“gain power by the use people make of it and by the people who have access to
language means and public fora” (Baker et al. 2008: 280) – mainly symbolic élites
such as politicians, journalists, influential entrepreneurs and educators who dom-
inate and control public discourses.
In line with Semino (2008: 90), ideologies will be treated here as “cognitive
phenomena, i.e. as (shared) conceptualizations of particular aspects of reality”.
Since ideologies are conceptual systems of a particular kind (Lakoff 1996: 37)
and since language (use) reflects and shapes conceptual structures and processes
(Hart 2015b: 326), it follows that linguistic phenomena such as conventional
metaphorical patterns in discourses can afford us an insight into ideologies shared
by members of particular social groups (ibid.: 326; cf. also van Dijk 1987, 2000a;
Chilton & Schäffner 2002; Dirven, Frank & Pütz 2003; Semino 2008). Already
four decades ago, Lakoff and Johnson noted that “metaphors create realities for
us, especially social realities” (1980: 56). The term “metaphor”, in this context, was
most likely intended to refer to various instantiations of a common underlying
conceptual metaphor which has become conventionalised in a speech community
and which may also carry certain ideological associations (cf. also Dirven, Frank
& Pütz 2003: 7).
To provide an example from the migration discourse: If migrants (as a social
group) and migration (as a social process) are continuously referred to in news
articles as a “tidal wave” or a “tsunami” “pouring” or “streaming” into Europe,
as a migratory “flow” or a mass “influx” – particularly in contexts where anti-
immigration policies are being advocated –, this is indicative of the larger con-
ceptual metaphor migration is a natural disaster12 (cf. also Santa Ana 2002;
Semino 2008; Kainz 2016). However, after a while the use of such terms may not
be perceived as metaphorical and ideologically-loaded anymore by the in-group
(non-migrants), but regarded as the “natural” way of talking about refugees and
migration. As Hart (2019: 83) puts it, “toward the more conventional end of the
cline from novel to conventional metaphor, […] language users are not aware that
they are producing or processing metaphor”. However, while the negative conno-
tations linked to the source domain of natural disaster and the ideological set
of assumptions tied to this metaphor may not be consciously noticed anymore by
the in-group,13 linguistic expressions such as the ones above may still be perceived
as offensive and discriminatory by the out-group (migrants). Moreover, negative
associations may be subconsciously activated in language users belonging to the
in-group and projected onto migrants and their arrival in Europe.
The metaphorical use of “tidal wave” or “influx” contributes to the mental
construal of the scenario as particularly uncontrollable and threatening, therefore
supporting the topos of “danger” (e.g. Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Semino 2008; Hart
2015a). The reasoning goes as follows: Refugees and asylum seekers are entering
Europe in large numbers; their arrival will continue unless abated; this may cause
major (economic and socio-cultural) disruption for the receiving countries and
their in-groups; as a logical consequence, restrictive political measures must be
supported and implemented (cf. also Semino 2008: 88). According to El Refaie
(2001: 368), the constant repetition of conventional metaphors such as migration
is a natural disaster seems to “act as a frame for the way in which events and
groups of people are perceived”. Semino (2008: 88) warns that such metaphors in
news articles can have “significant […] consequences for the short-term mental
representation of the particular situation which readers will form” while engaging
with the news text. As Allport (1954: 200, cited in Mutz & Goldman 2010: 241)
already noted, stereotypes are “socially supported, continually revived and ham-
mered in, by our media of mass communication”. Stereotyping might in turn lead
to negative attitudes and prejudices towards the out-group (in this case migrants),
which might in turn affect the judgement and behaviour of individuals belonging
12. The use of the water theme seems to be particularly popular in the migration discourse,
not just in English-speaking contexts but also in the German, Swedish, Bosnian-Herzegovinian
and Lithuanian media landscapes, to name just a few. The prevalence of this theme might be
explained by the fact that many refugees arrive on European shores by boat and that a com-
parison of mass migration to water masses seems a rather obvious choice, at least in anti-
immigration discourse. Dangerous waters metaphors have been heavily criticised in migration
studies because of their “dehumanizing and panic-inducing nature” (Kainz 2016).
13. That is, the expressions are not necessarily processed any more via a cross-domain map-
ping or conceptual blending operation.
60 Monika Reif
to the in-group and produce inequitable treatment of members belonging to the

out-group (Diekman et al. 2010: 209).
Regarding the mental representation of e.g. social groups and events, Semino
(2008: 87) suggests that we need to distinguish between two main types of mental
representations, namely “the short-term mental representations that we form
while processing a particular text” and “the long-term mental representations
[…] that make up our background knowledge and world-view”. These two types
are supposed to interact with each other: On the one hand, short-term mental
representations are “partly formed on the basis of long-term representations”;
on the other hand, short-term mental representations may themselves become
entrenched and become “part of long-term memory” (ibid.: 87). Both novel, ad-
hoc creations and more conventionalised metaphors are therefore of interest
when it comes to analysing authentic language use and its potential impact on the
formation of representations and ideologies.14
In order to operationalise conceptual metaphors (and systems of conceptual
metaphors), it is often considered useful to view metaphors as “conventionalised
products of collective practices” (Müller 2008: 23). Most traditional conceptual
metaphor models therefore exhibit a dualistic structure, depicting (i) a source
domain and (ii) a target domain onto which certain features, relations and eval-
uative associations from the source domain are mapped, as is reflected in the
formula migration is a natural disaster (see, e.g., the well-known models
contained in Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980) seminal work and in Kövecses’ (2002)
introduction). However, when it comes to the analysis of dynamic discourses,
particularly of the continuation of certain metaphor scenarios in interactive
computer-mediated communication, the focus needs to be shifted onto “the con-
structive processes involved in conceiving and perceiving metaphors” (Müller
2008: 23). According to Müller (ibid.: 26ff.), we should keep in mind that the par-
allel activation of the two domains or concepts is triggered by language, i.e. by the
metaphorical expressions in the text. She therefore prefers a metaphor model with
a triadic structure which systematically includes the role of the mediating entity
or process, namely the linguistic sign that – when being processed – connects two
non-linguistic concepts or domains.
Hart (2015a: 113ff.) goes one step further by suggesting that in order to analyse
metaphor at the interpretation stage, Conceptual Blending Theory is “more
14. As Gibbs (2017: 57) notes, “speakers typically employ some combination of conventional
and novel metaphorical phrases as they express their thoughts about abstract topics. […] This
flexibility in metaphorical language use highlights people’s abilities to rely on both entrenched
linguistic conventions and more innovative metaphorical conceptions when describing their
experiences”.
appropriate” than Conceptual Metaphor Theory because the former is “a theory

of conceptualisation during discourse” (emphasis MR), while the latter is “a theory
of conceptual organisation”. The ideas and constructs underlying the conceptual
blending model can be summarised as follows:
In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate,

‘blended’ mental space. The projection is selective. Through completion and
elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences,
arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading
us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situ-
ations. (Fauconnier & Turner 1998: 1)
We will see later on in the empirical analysis that blends do indeed seem to
operate according to their own logic, and that this logic is highly dependent on
which “skeletal properties” (ibid.: 24) of the two input spaces are brought into the
blend. It is important to note that this selection is – at least partly – dependent
on the co- and context. To provide just one example: Depending on whether bees
are construed as useful insects in need of our protection or as killer bees wait-
ing to attack mankind, the migrants are animals/insects/parasites metaphor
can be (deliberately) interpreted in diametrically different ways, as one of the
comment sections will reveal. Importantly, the interpreter’s view of and attitude
towards migrants, i.e. the target domain, has a profound impact on the kind of
information that is selected and projected from the source domain. Moreover,
in conceptual blending – and also in more recent conceptual metaphor models
(e.g. Kövecses 2015, 2020) – we do not presuppose a unidirectionality of mapping
operations from source to target. Instead, the inferences can go from the blended
space to both of the input spaces (Fauconnier & Turner 1998: 25).
By taking a discourse-dynamic perspective on metaphor, we thus no longer
see metaphor as a static and fairly fixed conceptual mapping, but rather as “a tem-
porary stability emerging from the activity of inter-connecting systems of socially-
situated language use and cognitive activity” (Cameron et al. 2009: 63). The term
“socially-situated language use” implies that in order to make sense of a metaphor-
ical expression, close attention needs to be paid to the immediate co-text, the
discourse genre, as well as the socio-cultural and discourse-historical contexts of
the utterance.15 Eubanks (2000) further stresses the importance of the richly pat-
terned regularities which identify the rhetoric of a specific discourse and also gov-
ern and constrain the use of metaphors typically associated with this discourse:
15. See e.g. the chapters on “contextual factors” and “context and metaphorical creativity” in
Kövecses (2015) for a discussion of potential priming effects of contextual factors on the human
mind to establish metaphors.
62 Monika Reif
Since conceptual metaphors are shared across cultures, inhere to particular cul-
tures, and take on specific regularities within communities of discourse, regulari-
ties of use are fundamental to the composition of metaphor. In other words, it is
not enough to note that a conceptual metaphor is often said. We also have to
understand how it is often said. (Eubanks 2000: 26; emphasis MR)
In order to give full credit to the complexities of discourse dynamics and to

the fact that metaphors often occur in networks and clusters16 within a text
and across texts, a multi-level analysis seems most appropriate, following e.g.
Cameron (1999), Semino, Deignan & Littlemore (2012) and Vogelbacher (2019).
Systematicities of metaphor use can be found at the local level (an extended
metaphor or combinations of metaphors within one particular text), the discourse
level (recurring conceptual metaphors within a specific discourse tradition or
community; recontextualisation of metaphors across genres and registers), and
the global level (basic metaphors reflecting fundamental underlying ways of
thinking) (cf. Cameron 1999: 16).
Since the present study looks at metaphor use within different genres (i.e.
news reader comment sections and news reports/opinion pieces) on one specific
topic (i.e. migration) with a longstanding discourse history, the main focus will
rest upon the local level (intratextuality) and the discourse level (intertextuality),
and upon the types of conceptual metaphors Hart (2015a: 114) refers to as
“metaphors in cultural domains”. These kinds of metaphors are assumed to “be
based in discourse and have become conceptual through processes of cultural
and cognitive entrenchment”.17 (The migration is a natural disaster and
migrants are animals/insects/parasites metaphors discussed above are
prominent examples of such cultural metaphors.)
Musolff, in his scenario approach, likewise takes a more pragmatic, discourse-
centred and dynamic perspective on metaphors in order to link the conceptual
side of metaphor to its usage patterns in socially situated discourse (e.g. Musolff
2006, 2016).
[S]cenarios include narrative, argumentative and evaluative frame-aspects, which

suggest a specific, pragmatically loaded perspective for inferences about the tar-
get topic. These inferences are not cognitively or logically binding but rather a set
of assumptions made by […] members of a discourse community about […] typi-
16. In the analysis at hand, a distinction is made between metaphor networks (groups of
metaphorical expressions belonging to the same conceptual metaphor) and metaphor clusters
(combinations of metaphorical expressions belonging to different conceptual metaphors), both
occurring with high density across a particular stretch of discourse.
17. As opposed to primary metaphors in domains such as as time or love, which are claimed
to be grounded in our bodily experience (cf. Hart 2015a: 114).
cal elements of the source concepts (participants, story lines, default outcomes)
as well as ethical evaluations, which are connected to social attitudes and emo-
tional stances prevalent in the respective discourse community.
(Musolff 2016: 64)
Scenarios enable the speakers to not only apply source to target concepts but to
draw on them to build narrative frames for the conceptualization and assessment
of sociopolitical issues and to ‘spin out’ these narratives into emergent discourse
traditions that are characteristic of their respective community. (Musolff 2006: 36)
Since the migration discourse abounds with well-established metaphors and
narrative frames and since reader comments in discussion fora sometimes display
creative continuations of and intentional deviations from conventionalised sce-
narios, Musolff ’s framework lends itself well for the analysis at hand – in com-
bination with Conceptual Blending Theory, which helps us to operationalise
the cognitive construal of the respective scenarios and to draw inferences about
intended evaluative and affective perlocutionary effects.
In addition to the various context levels, we also need to consider the com-
municative purpose(s) of the interaction at hand, including argumentative aims,
in order to identify the overall “point” of the metaphor, i.e. whether it is descrip-
tive/explanatory or evaluative, uplifting or degrading, serious or humorous (cf.
Steen 1999; Semino, Deignan & Littlemore 2012). In the migration debate, certain
topoi, i.e. content-related warrants connecting the argument with the conclusion
(cf. Kienpointner 1992: 194), tend to recur and to be connected with particular
conceptual metaphors (for a list of frequent topoi and fallacies see, for example,
ch. 2 in Reisigl & Wodak 2001 and table 6.2 in Charteris-Black 2014). Calculating
metaphor-topoi correlations might thus be a useful strategy for detecting patterns
related to typical communicative purposes and argument schemes.
In this regard we need to be careful though to distinguish between the acts of
claiming and ascribing. It makes a considerable difference to the overall “point” of
a metaphor whether it is claimed by its author or whether it is ascribed to some-
one else:18
When we utter a metaphor, we do not necessarily intend the metaphor, as it is

typically inflected, to represent our view. Thus, we either claim the metaphor and
its understood commitments, or just as often, we utter it only in order to repre-
sent someone else’s viewpoint: we ascribe it. Degrees of claiming and ascribing
are possible. (Eubanks 2000: 27–28)
18. Cf. also Semino (2008: 89) and Chilton (2004: 202) for the distinction between claiming
and ascribing
64 Monika Reif
If a discriminatory metaphor such as “flatten it19……… and remove the vermin”

(The Sun, comment section, 11 Nov 2016, paul bennett; emphasis MR) is claimed,
this reflects the author’s negative, hostile stance towards migrants. By contrast,
ascribing a metaphor can be seen as a meta-representation, that is, a representa-
tion of others’ views of the world, as in “Hungarian police have herded hundreds
of migrants into a stark ‘Alien Holding Centre’ surrounded by 13ft fences topped
with razor wire” (Daily Mail, article, 7 Sep 2015; emphasis MR) or “Cameron call-
ing Calais migrants a ‘swarm’ is nothing short of disgraceful” (Guardian/Twitter,
comment section, 20 July 2015, Andy Burnham; emphasis MR). By putting the
metaphors “Alien Holding Centre” and “swarm” into scare quotes, the writers sig-
nal that the expressions have been borrowed from some other source’s idiolect
(e.g. Fairclough 1992; Predelli 2003) and that they want to distance themselves
from the views held by these sources – the Hungarian Police and former British
Prime Minister David Cameron, respectively. In a sound analysis of metaphor in
discourse, a close inspection of the individual tokens is therefore indispensable.
To describe precisely how metaphors are developed in the reader comments
to either make an argument for/against current immigration policies or to assess
the acceptability of certain metaphors in the discursive context of migration/
migrants, previous studies by Chilton & Ilyin (1993), Cameron (2008) and
Musolff (2004) offer preliminary templates for analysis. Despite their different
labels – metaphor formulation, metaphor shifting and scenario modification,
respectively – the three categorisation schemes show substantial overlap, as we
will see in Section 3.2.3.
3. Empirical study
3.1 Data, research questions and methodology
The texts to be analysed were selected from a pool of news articles (reports and
features) plus comment sections published in periods of increased reference to the
so-called “European migration crisis”, which started in 2015 when the conflict in
Syria, violence in Afghanistan, and poverty in sub-Saharan African countries esca-
lated. All texts stem from British national newspapers and were sampled from the
respective online sites in the period between July 2015 and December 2016, with
a fairly equal balance between broadsheets with a more liberal, left-oriented edi-
torial stance (e.g. The Guardian, The Independent, BBC News) and tabloids with a
more conservative, right-oriented agenda (e.g. The Daily Mail, The Sun/The Sun-
19. By “it”, the author is referring to a refugee camp in Paris, France.

day Express). The vast majority of comment sections were directly attached below
the respective articles to be accessed publicly, but were still gated, meaning that
in order to post a comment the user had to provide some information (as well as
a nickname) to the website. Only a few of the discussions were “outsourced” to
Twitter, usually by political actors starting a discussion (e.g. by posting a provoca-
tive quote/statement) on their own Twitter page which was then linked to the
news article itself. News readers did not need to be registered on Twitter to follow
the discussion online. In terms of size, the corpus comprised 20 articles and over
7,000 reader comments; the comments were of differing lengths, ranging from
individual words (“Flock”), short phrases (“A calamity”) and simple sentences
(“Well they are swarming”) to rather elaborate texts containing complex lines of
argumentation and narratives.
The criteria for inclusion in the corpus were threefold: First, since the focus
of this study rests upon metaphor uptake and (dis-)continuation, both the article
and the comment section had to contain at least one metaphorical expression
related to the topic of migration. Second, as metaphors are frequently employed
for argumentative purposes in the migration debate and as the correlation
between conceptual metaphors and argumentative topoi is of immense interest
here, the news articles had to address diverse issues linked to migration (e.g.
refugee camps, human trafficking, migration data, the economic impact of migra-
tion, national security, integration measures) to make sure a variety of topoi are
present. Third, in order to get a more comprehensive picture of the function of
metaphors in the migration debate, both topic-related discussions and language-
related meta-discussions were taken into account, the latter yielding particularly
interesting findings on metaphor continuation. Since former British PM David
Cameron’s “swarm comment” on Calais migrants20 caused a lot of furore among
politicians, human rights organisations and the general public, one part of the
corpus exclusively consists of comments on the (un)acceptability of the swarm
metaphor.
The study was guided by the following research questions: (1) Which of the
migration metaphors (both conceptual metaphors and metaphorical linguistic
expressions) present in the news articles are taken up in the comment sections,
and to which purpose(s)? (2) How do metaphors interact with argumentative
topoi, especially in anti-migration discourse, and what precisely seems to be
the discourse function of mixed metaphors? (3) Which metaphor continuation
20. In an interview on ITV, David Cameron labelled migrants trying to get into the UK as “a
swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life” (emphasis added), a
term that was heavily criticised by the Refugee Council and various Labour politicians.
66 Monika Reif
strategies can be identified in the meta-discourse on the (un)acceptability of

potentially dehumanising metaphors?
In order to find metaphorical expressions in the corpus, the following pro-
cedure was employed, loosely based on the metaphor identification procedure
(MIP) first suggested by the Pragglejazz Group (2007) and later modified by
related research groups (e.g. Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit
[MIPVU] by Steen et al. 2010; Deliberate Metaphor Identification Procedure
[DMIP] by Reijnierse et al. 2017).21 When a word, including multi-word items
such as compounds and phrasal verbs, appeared to be used indirectly and that
use could be “potentially explained by some form of cross-domain mapping from
a more basic meaning of that word”, the word was marked as “metaphorically
used” (Steen et al. 2010: 25). For the purpose of the current study, only those
metaphors were considered whose target concept related to the larger social group
of refugees/asylum seekers/economic migrants, their behaviour and characteris-
tics, to the phenomenon of migration in general, and to all steps, procedures and
effects associated with the migration process. The metaphorical expressions were
grouped according to their underlying conceptual metaphors, and it was further
noted which linguistic form they took and whether they co-occurred with spe-
cific argumentative topoi22 (such as economic burden, threat to national secu-
rity, cultural differences/culture clashes). Particularly interesting uses of metaphor
(e.g. novel creations, mixed metaphors and instances of potentially deliberate
metaphors) were marked in the data set for subsequent qualitative analysis.
Table 1 is meant to illustrate the makeup of the corpus and to provide some rep-
resentative examples. Please note that all quotes appear as they were originally
phrased, including typos, punctuation mistakes, grammatical and lexical errors
and awkward stylistic choices.
Table 1. Corpus data (selection)

Form/ Conceptual
structure Corpus examples (emphasis added) metaphor(s) Topos/topoi
N1 is N2 “illegally entering a country in mass is migration as physical danger/
an invasion. UK must defend itself invasion threat
against invasion”
(Twitter comment, 30 July 2015,
forgotten ppl)
21. See Deignan (2017) for criticism of Steen’s five-step model.

22. The categories of topoi were based on ch. 2 in Reisigl & Wodak (2001) and table 6.2 in
Charteris-Black (2014).
Table 1. (continued)
Form/ Conceptual
“not infested. Infected with the disease migrants as physical danger/
that is illegal immigwants.” disease threat
(Twitter comment, 31 July 2015,
JeSuisABiyatch)
N1 is/ “They are behaving exactly like migrants as physical danger/
behaves like swarms of locusts, devouring insects threat
N2 everything in their wake, and leaving
destruction behind.”
(Daily Mail, comment section,
30 July 2015, Scroggins)
“These people are attracted to Britain migrants as quantity/
as bee’s are to flowers.” insects numbers (&
(Daily Mail, comment section, financial burden)
30 July 2015, annie m.)
structural “we don’t want your criminal parasite migrants as physical danger/
blending rapugees” criminals/rapists threat
(The Sun, comment section,
10 Nov 2016, trev stans)
source “They’ll be being fed and watered with migrants as rightful
domain safe shelter” livestock inequality &
expressed in (Daily Mail, comment section, economic
VP 7 Sept 2015, gonetothedogs67) competition
source “An endless conveyor belt of agitated migrants as mass- quantity/
domain young men” produced goods numbers &
expressed in (Daily Mail, comment section, physical danger/
postmodified 5 Sep 2015, implant26B) threat
NP “you will soon find yourself undercut migration as quantity/
by an influx of foreign workers who natural disaster numbers &
are more willing to take lower wages” economic
(Guardian, Comment Is Free, competition
24 March 2015, Topher)
source “This country is bursting at the seams, receiving quantity/
domain can’t understand why more isn’t being country as numbers &
expressed done to stop them.” container financial burden
through (Daily Mail, comment section,
idiom 30 July 2015, Jphill49)
68 Monika Reif
Form/ Conceptual
source “More correctly described as an migrants as financial burden/
domain uncontrollable, violently thuggish scroungers abuse
expressed in mob”
AdjP (Daily Mail, comment section,
30 July 2015, Jimmy R)
mixed “These useful idiots of the West are migration as cultural threat
metaphors currently destroying European natural disaster
civilization by encouraging and & migration as
demanding permissiveness and invasion
openness regarding the mass
immigration wave that is invading
Europe.”
(Guardian, comment section,
20 Sep 2015, Melissa Mészáros)
metaphor “this is all caused by Merkel …she receiving quantity/
scenarios threw the doors wide open, so they all country as numbers (&
started to flood there, now she slams container & physical danger/
them shut and leaves all the countries migration as threat, economic
en-route the Germany to face the natural disaster burden)
consequences”
(Guardian, comment section,
20 Sep 2015, WorkingBloke)
3.2 Results
3.2.1 Overview of source domains and topoi
3.2.1.1 Conventionalised metaphors

Given that human migration is a recurring phenomenon and that its underlying
logic, the in-groups’ reactions to it and the discourses surrounding it have been
remarkably consistent over the years, it is not surprising that the majority of
metaphors found in my data on the current migration debate are conventionalised
metaphors (see Figure 1).
The most frequent source domains used to talk about the process and poten-
tial consequences of migration in the corpus at hand are the domains of natural
disaster and war. Interestingly, the natural disaster metaphors almost exclu-
sively make use of scenarios involving water-related hazards with forces and
Figure 1. Common source domains in the current British migration discourse
impacts of different scales, ranging from tsunami analogies to motion verbs

directly or indirectly indicating a slow but steady influx (e.g. flow, pour in; turn
off the tap). That is, we can observe a restriction in the mapping scope to a
particular type of natural disaster, and language users seem to draw repeatedly
on specific lexical items linked to this area of the source domain, most notably
influx (N), flow/inflow (N), wave/tidal wave (N), flood/flooding (N), to pour (V ),
floodgates (N), to flood (V ), tide (N), to stream (V ) and to sweep (V ). The fact
that water plays a crucial role in the migrant journey itself, with a considerable
number of migrants having to cross oceans in boats23 and being dependent on
human trafficking, might have initially triggered these water-related scenarios.
Over time, the above-listed verbal metaphorical expressions have gotten progres-
sively entrenched in the migration discourse and have now become naturalised.
23. Interestingly, lifeboats – which stand in a metonymic relationship with the migrant jour-
ney – are sometimes also used as source domains in metaphors where the receiving country or
unit is compared to a container with limited room and resources, as in “It’s physically impos-
sible to fit a Pint into a Half-Pint glass and, similarly, it’s impossible for our already over-
congested little island of very finite resources to be the world’s lifeboat” (Guardian, comment
section, 20 Sep 2015, Sin_Signalling).
70 Monika Reif
Similarly, the majority of war metaphors tend to evoke one particular sce-
nario, namely the scenario of an invasion by a foreign army, which is reflected in
lexical choices such as invasion (N), to be invaded (V ), invaders (N), army (of
refugees) (N), the receiving country being under siege (PP), to besiege (V ) and
intrusion (N). The host country is usually assigned the semantic role of ‘patient’
or ‘affected entity’ in this scenario, which can be seen by the predominance of
passive voice constructions with the verb invade. Only in the (self-)destruc-
tion scenario that occurs a couple of times in the corpus does the host country
play a more active role; here, the noun self-destruction puts blame on political
actors, either U.K. “lefties” or representatives of the E.U., for the current crisis.
The invasion metaphor clearly positions the migrant as a source of conflict, and
one could even argue that it is encompassed by a perception of moral inferiority
of the out-group (cf. also Taylor 2021: 465). Historically seen, Taylor (ibid.: 463),
in her diachronic study on migration rhetoric, found that while the liquid/nat-
ural disaster metaphor has persisted through a long period of time (her corpus
comprising texts from 1800–2018), the invasion metaphor is more recent in its
conventionalised form (starting around 1940).
Both the natural disaster and war metaphors are employed in arguments
for a restrictive immigration policy and correlate positively with the topoi of
“physical danger”, “cultural threat” and “economic burden”. They are used to legit-
imise political action and sometimes even physical violence against migrants.
Depending on the degree of “intensity” of the respective source domain scenario
drawn upon, different measures – and also different projections for the future of
Britain/Europe if no measures be taken – are suggested. For instance, tsunami
and flood references tend to go hand in hand with Armageddon scenarios involv-
ing water, as can be seen in Examples (1a,b), while invasion references often co-
occur with predictions of the violent destruction of Britain/Europe and its values,
whereby the political units of Britain/Europe are usually objectified or personi-
fied, as in Examples (1c,d).
(1) a. It’s started a few years ago and the tsunami that is going to hit billions of
people is already beginning. […] Somehow other Ms. Merkel does not see
the handwriting on the wall and seems very interested in foolishly taking
care of German problem of short duration that will sink all in the EU.
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sept 2015, foggy2; emphasis
added)
b. […] accepting this reality is happening will eventually see our vessel sink
with all lost, fix the leak, fix the middle East before it all spills over into
Europe.
(Guardian, comment section, 4 Sept 2015, Reia Hriso; emphasis
added)
c. A Muslim Invasion that will change the face of Europe forever. Destroyed,
the freedoms hard fought for a millennia, gone.
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sept 2015, bigquestionmark;
emphasis added)
d. I do not understand why politicians try to destroy Europe, European cul-
ture and our values, this is invasion”
(Daily Mail, comment section, 5 Sept 2015, Sunnydee; emphasis
added)
The destruction scenario can also be frequently found alongside metaphors com-
paring migrants/migrant behaviour with animals/animal behaviour. Analogies
are drawn to the categories of insects (such as bees, wasps, flies, locusts, ants,
cockroaches, fleas), parasitic animals (such as leeches), rodents (such as rats), ser-
pents, and livestock that is kept in herds. In the “Great Chain of Being”, the cul-
tural model still prevalent in Western societies which places human beings at the
top of a vertical scale encompassing hierarchically “higher” and “lower” beings,
these groups of animals are positioned very low (cf., for example, Lakoff & Turner
1989 and Hawkins 2001 for a more detailed description of the “Great Chain of
Being” from a cognitive linguistic perspective, and Lovejoy 1933 for an outline
of the history of this philosophical idea). The groups of animals listed above
have been culturally assigned negative qualities: In Exodus 10, a plague of locusts
invades Egypt and devours everything growing in the fields; the serpent is one of
the oldest mythological symbols and is connected, among other things, with evil,
venom, and a lack of trustworthiness; bees, while generally considered busy and
useful animals, nonetheless feature in quite a few horror/science fiction movies
and action video games in a predatory role, e.g. in The Swarm (1978), Deadly
Swarm (2003), Swarmed (2005), Black Swarm (2007), Killer Swarm (2008) and
Attack of the Killer Swarm (2006). The use of such discriminatory language to talk
about migrants shows considerable overlap with e.g. the way Jews were charac-
terised in the anti-semitic discourse of Nazi Germany or the way members of the
minority group of Tutsi were referred to in radio broadcasts during the Rwandan
Civil War.
While the natural disaster and war metaphors discussed above are present
in both sub-corpora, i.e. the one derived from more liberal, left-leaning news out-
lets and the one derived from more conservative, right-leaning papers, animal
comparisons almost exclusively occur in the Daily Mail and Sun sub-corpora and
clearly reflect racist ideologies.24 With regard to argumentative topoi, it can be said
24. The discourse surrounding David Cameron’s use of the swarm metaphor will be analysed
in more detail in Section 3.2.3 of this paper.
72 Monika Reif
that animal metaphors correlate positively with the argument that migrants pose
a financial threat to the social welfare system of the receiving country (“economic
burden”), as well as the strategy of explicit dissimilation of the in-group’s and
out-group’s cultural values (“cultural threat”) (cf. also Charteris-Black 2014: 135;
Reisigl & Wodak 2001: 48). Throughout history, animal comparisons and imagery
have been used to justify social exclusion on moral grounds and have been delib-
erately placed “to fuel or promote aggressive behaviours against unknown indi-
viduals” (Andrighetto et al. 2016: 630). This is also the case in the corpus at hand,
as can be seen in Examples (2a–c). Exclusion of and aggression against a par-
ticular social group can be carried out with less moral restraint if this group is
depicted as non-human, inferior, and potentially harmful. Explicit dissimilation
is furthermore articulated through xenonyms such as illegal aliens, alien culture
and alien holding centre (for ‘refugee camp’). In the value system attached to the
“Great Chain in Being”, aliens even stand outside “life as we know it” (cf. Hawkins
2001: 44). According to the commenter below (2d), migrants belong to the cat-
egory of aliens “either by choice or design”, the latter phrase clearly hinting at a
racist ideology.
(2a) build it……….. and they will come……… are the French that thick ?…… flat-
ten it……… and remove the vermin
(The Sun, comment section, 11 Nov 2016, paul bennett; emphasis added)
(2b) @Bella I agree 100%! Why are these illegal immigrants allowed to just walk
into Europe and demand that we look after them? They should either be
denied entry or rounded up and deported ASAP. … WE DON’T WANT
THEM FFS!
(The Sun, comment section, 11 Nov 2016, John Tunstall; emphasis in ital-
ics added)
(2c) if you don’t want them, protect your borders. we don’t want your criminal
parasite rapugees.
(The Sun, comment section, 11 Nov 2016, trev stans; emphasis added)
(2d) Actually we can stop calling them migrants now because this lot are actually
illegal aliens either by choice or design.
(The Sun, comment section, 11 Nov 2016, David Willey; emphasis added)
Another metaphor that occurs predominantly in conservative, right-leaning
papers is the sponge metaphor. In the Daily Mail comment sections, for instance,
migrants are repeatedly referred to by nouns such as “spongers”, “scroungers”,
“parasites” and “leeches”, and their behaviour is described by verbal expressions
such as “to sponge”, “to suck up (our benefits)”, “to feast (on benefits)”, “to leech
off (other countries)”, as well as adjectives such as “thuggish” (see Examples 3a,b).
There is, of course, some overlap and interaction between the animal and
sponge metaphors since animals such as leeches, which have suckers at both ends
and are associated with the procedure of drawing blood from human beings, do
also feature in sponging-scenarios.
(3a) Well they are after all like fleas sucking up our benefits, so swarm sounds OK
to me.
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, BillyRN; emphasis added)
(3b) Welcome brothers, remember to claim asylum yeah. You will get your own
house, kettle and teabags to make me an English cuppa when I come to
visit. Don’t forget the Victoria Sponge x
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, honeymoon; emphasis
added)
Since the migration debate and the Brexit debate are intricately intertwined, it is
not surprising that the topoi of “economic burden” and “physical/cultural threat”,
which prevail in both discourses,25 stand in the foreground in those comments
whose main aim it is to spur on other readers to support Brexit and/or UKIP. In
comments with a decidedly pro-UKIP stance,26 and also in comments by read-
ers whose nicknames already hint at pro-UKIP or pro-Brexit bias, the receiv-
ing political unit and its population are often conceptualised as bodies that are
negatively affected by migration, and migration itself as some form of illness or
infestation. body-state analogies have been used in political discourse for a con-
siderable amount of time (cf. Musolff 2010 for a historical overview of the body
politic metaphor). The present corpus data shows that especially those source
domain aspects which are linked to illness – along with some related argumen-
tative application patterns – are still prevalent today in the conceptualisation of
the socio-political consequences of migration. Again, we can see some similari-
ties to the discursive manifestation of Nazi ideology: The alien invader (in Nazi
Germany, ‘The Jew’) is the (source of ) illness about to destroy the health, and
eventually the existence, of the receiving political unit, and therefore needs to be
exterminated (cf. Musolff 2010: 35–36). As becomes evident from the examples
below, the illness sometimes takes the shape of dangerous, alien ideologies which
the in-group needs to prevent from spreading to their nation body, hence feed-
ing into the topos of “cultural threat” (see 4a,b). In other instances, the metaphor
25. Cap (2019: 69) even identifies Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration campaign as the main cause
of the Brexit referendum outcome: “Specifically, the anti-immigration discourse in 2013–2016
was instrumental in instilling a sense of public uncertainty and ever-growing anxiety, inspiring
isolationist stances and explicitly xenophobic attitudes, which found their outlet on the day of
the referendum.”
26. Such comments frequently entail directive speech acts such as “Vote UKIP!”.
74 Monika Reif
scenario of a body bleeding dry is set up, in which blood is construed as a valu-
able commodity essential to the survival of the body (see 4d). By highlighting the
source domain aspect of a liquid (here: blood) the body can run out of, the writer
taps into metaphorical vocabulary that we also find in economic discourse (e.g.
public finances running dry; financial liquidity; the ebb and flow of cash), hence
serving the topos of “economic burden”.27 If the illness or infestation cannot be
stopped, it is predicted that the nation body will become extinct (see 4e) – hence
the call for extermination of the infectious out-group (see 4f ).
(4a) There is a pretence of restriction, but this Government and the previous
one have signally failed to prevent criminals, gold-diggers and malignant
alien influences from infesting our country. […] Vote UKIP. Even a few
strong voices in Parliament will have some influence on our behalf.
(Guardian, Comment Is Free, 24 March 2015, TGSSchweik; emphasis
added)
(4b) I feel bad for the refugees as people, but they’ve all been infected by a very
dangerous ideology and should not be allowed to spread it in Europe.
(Guardian, comment section, 4 Sept 2015, Goldenbird; emphasis added)
(4c) “Swarm” sounds an appropriate metaphor to me – they want our pollen and
we’re getting stung.
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Anonymous; emphasis
added)
(4d) They are like a swarm of insects – Cameron is right!! We don’t want them
here bleeding us even more dry than what we already are
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Jules; emphasis added)
(4e) Bees gather round a honey pot its a known fact – there is no bigger honey
pot for every bee than the UK – vote UKIP or like the bees we will become
extinct !
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, ouchagain; emphasis added)
(4f ) A “swarm” is how Cameron described these people. And what do we do
with “swarm” critters; extermination with bug spray. Come, Cameron, act
like a man and not that a Merkel. Get a grip and pull the trigger.
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Alex Swann; emphasis
added)
27. The topos of “economic burden” also features in (4c), where “our pollen” stands for the
economic resources of the in-group and the action of stinging (“we’re getting stung”) for the
alleged financial exploitation of the in-group.
However, as already noted by Hart (2015a: 130–144), the main metaphor running
through the migration discourse when it comes to conceptualising the receiving
political unit (in the present corpus Britain and/or the E.U.) is the one recruiting
a container schema. This schema allows for a binary set-up which draws a
boundary between the inside and the outside of the container, and in which social
groups are assigned the status of insiders (the in-group) or outsiders (the out-
group). This framing of the situation creates barriers and distance between the
groups involved and inevitably leads to othering. Depending on the lexical spec-
ification of the metaphor, the concept of containment either remains implicit
and vague (see Examples 5a,b), or the container takes on a more concrete
shape (e.g. that of a house with front/back doors that can be opened or locked,
see Examples 5c–e, or that of a lifeboat taking on more and more passengers,
see Example 5f). These more specific instantiations of the container schema
are bound up with culture-specific associations and assumptions (cf. Hart
2015a: 137–144). For instance, a house is a valuable place that you need to build
and maintain, a social space that you share with like-minded people, a secure
place that you can feel safe in, and a private space which you have the right to
refuse entry to (cf. Chilton 1996 for a list of cultural assumptions linked to the
concept of home in Cold War discourse). Gate-crashing, on the other hand, is
a type of behaviour that is considered immoral and unwanted (see 5e). In the
corpus at hand, the container metaphor is frequently combined with other
metaphors, most prominently natural disaster (see 5g).
(5a) This country [the U.K.] is bursting at the seams
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Jphill49)
(5b) #wearefull (Guardian, comment section, 20 Sept 2015, Pugnamus Amo Leo)
(5c) Its like the EU is a house with no lock on the door
(Guardian, comment section, 4 Sept 2015, Reia Hriso)
(5d) […] an open door to allcomers just makes us a doormat
(Guardian, comment section, 4 Sept 2015, Ray Mich)
(5e) Mr.Cameron did not adequately describe gate crashing tactics by just utter-
ing ‘swarming’. (Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, chembukkavu)
(5f ) How many can the lifeboat save before it sinks under the weight of bodies?
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sept 2015, digamey)
(5g) I would not be surprised if Cameron would happy open the flood gates as
part of his plan to wipe us out.
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Vinni)
76 Monika Reif
All of the above-mentioned conceptual metaphors display a tendency to be

accompanied by exaggerated figures for the number of refugees/migrants enter-
ing (or about to enter) the country/political unit. Either concrete numbers are
“quoted” without being attributed to a (reliable) source, such as the Home Office
or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or specu-
lations are voiced featuring vague predictions, e.g. “the sheer numbers of people
now pouring into Europe” or “Keep an open door and you will have millions
in a few years”. Also, quite a few of the conventionalised metaphors referred to
above already imply large quantities themselves, e.g. “[t]he tidal wave flooding into
Europe”, “It is not in our interest to take a massive influx of immigrants”, “the
beginnings of a mass exodus”, or “hoards of young non-christian men” (all exam-
ples taken from corpus; emphasis added).
In addition to these conventionalised expressions and scenarios that recur
time and again in the debate revolving around numbers, the present corpus also
contains some novel metaphors. One Daily Mail commenter, for instance, speaks
of “an endless conveyor belt of agitated young men” (Example 6; emphasis added),
thus dehumanising and collectivising young male refugees by comparing them to
mass-fabricated, uniform products.
(6) An endless conveyor belt of agitated young men. This is something to be
WORRIED about. (Daily Mail, comment section, 5 Sep 2015, implant26B)
An allusion to more conventionalised metaphorical uses of the expression con-
veyor belt may also be intended: The metaphor is regularly employed by mete-
orologists with regard to jet streams, i.e. fast-moving, narrow, meandering air
currents which may act as conveyor belts for storms. Applied to the script of the
migrant journey, it could have been the writer's intention to suggest that those
male migrants who are seeking to become residents in one of the E.U. mem-
ber states often act as “conveyor belts” for further family members, leading to
a “storm” of refugees. This brings us back to the more common comparison of
migrants to natural disasters such as tsunamis and floods. The following two sec-
tions are going to take a closer look at less common metaphors in the migration
discourse and how they feed into the argumentation, as well as the (presumably
deliberate) mixing of metaphors.
3.2.1.2 Novel creations and less established metaphors
When it comes to the discussion of push- and pull-factors and the debate sur-
rounding terms such as refugee, asylum seeker and economic migrant, metaphors
with religious roots (e.g. “the land of milk and honey”,28 “the Promised Land”),
metaphors taken from mythology (e.g. the Irish myth of the “pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow”), and metaphors with more secular, consumerist imagery
(e.g. “country shopping”, “asylum shoppers”, Angela Merkel as the refugees’ “sales
aid”) are very popular in the corpus at hand (see 7a-d for examples). Especially
the shopping scenario seems to have enjoyed a revival in the discursive context
of the Brexit. As Moore (2013) found, the use of the term “asylum shopping”
peaked between 2001 and 2003 in U.K. newspapers, a period during which further
enlargement of the Schengen area, introduction of the E.U.-wide fingerprint data-
base EURODAC, as well as the Dublin Regulation were prevalent topics in the
news, and then dropped continuously up until 2011. It looks like the fact that the
migration debate was at the heart of the Brexit referendum and that the two dis-
courses were woven together caused the shopping metaphors to resurface.
Within the shopping scenario, Europe is construed as a store holding several
items (countries) on offer from which the costumers (the migrants) can pick
freely. German chancellor Merkel is described as a sales aid advertising the
strengths of certain E.U. countries, hence encouraging migrants to embark on a
journey to western European countries such as Germany and the U.K. Merkel’s
optimistic phrase “Wir schaffen das [‘We will manage’]” has been repeatedly
described as a catastrophic mistake in anti-migrant discourses, both in comments
from the general population and in interviews of politicians such as Nigel Farage
and Donald Trump.
(7a) These people are nit fleeing. They are country shopping for the best welfare
they can find. Sympathy is becoming non existent for these chancers and
violent demanding thugs.
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, Blossomy)
(7b) And Italy, Germany, Spain, France and all the other countries that were not
good enough for them on their journey to the promised land of milk, honey
and JSA. (Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, mr gorsky)
(7c) Congratulations to Frau Merkel for her absolutely absurd statement wel-
coming all migrants to the EU . People smugglers throughout Africa, the
Indian sub continent and the Middle east now have the perfect sales aid in
persuading people to engage their services to get to the promised land of
Germany. (Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, jeanshaw1)
28. “On that day I swore to them that I would bring them out of the land of Egypt into a land
that I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all
lands.” (Ezekiel 20: 6; Old Testament, Standard English version)
78 Monika Reif
(7d) If we left the EU and stopped handing out free houses and benefits then
they’d have nothing to come here for,as long as there is that pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow then they will continue to come. We’ve not got the
money or resources to help everyone, we’ve got our own problems here in
the UK with work shy scroungers
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, ME)
By claiming that the vast majority of newly arrived people are just “shopping for
the good life” (Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, SaraNovember) and con-
sider themselves entitled to pick their “dream land of Germany, Sweden, France
or the UK” (Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, AnnaBurton), the com-
menters automatically place them in the category of economic migrants and deny
any possibility that the out-group may have a rightful claim to asylum on human-
itarian grounds. Metaphors such as “country shopping” construe the respective
countries of destination as valuable commodities and play down the dangers of
the migrant journey by comparing it to a pleasurable shopping experience. Ger-
man chancellor Angela Merkel is referred to as the migrants’ “sales aid” who is
pointing them in the direction of Europe (and Germany in particular), which
additionally impugns Merkel’s political authority and capability. The solution to
the “problem” is usually presented in the form of Brexit. At the same time, how-
ever, some of the commenters contest that the positive qualities we associate with
the “land of milk and honey” can actually be mapped onto the target destination.
Either they explicitly demand for the financial resources to be spent on people
in need belonging to the in-group (instead of outsiders), or they paint scenarios
of what might happen once the newcomers realise that Europe’s “streets are not
paved with gold”, implying that the economic situation in some European coun-
tries is already precarious and might destabilise even more due to the additional
burden migrants impose on the welfare state.
(8a) Possilby this generation, certainly the next, will realise that the streets are
not paved with gold and the benefits of European life not quite as good as
foretold. Be ready for a huge crimewave and IS-type terrorist acts commited
by Syrian gangs/individuals. Our children and grandchildren will damn us
in our graves….. (Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, adie74)
(8b) There are many unfortunates of all races living in the UK, but nobody seem
to bat an eyelid at their plight. […] Dont you understand that we have a
humanitarian crisis in our own country which nobody seem to want to
resolve, because it cost money. […] Show some compassion for what is hap-
pening infront of you.
(Guardian, comment section, 4 Sep 2015, Yolandi Lakes)
In this context, orientational metaphors with a downward direction come in, as

is reflected in various kinds of nouns, verbs, adverbs and prepositions. Especially
transit countries such as Greece are claimed to be “sinking under the weight of
these migrants” (Daily Mail, comment section, 5 Sep 2015, Nell); liberal parties are
described as “the architects of the downfall of the welfare state” (Guardian, com-
ment section, 4 Sep 2015, notaAGWsheep); and in the nation as a container/
house scenario it is predicted that migrants who are refused benefits burn down
the house in revenge:
(9) […] Now, 3,000 people are knocking on your door. Some of them are des-
perately in need of the medicine that your pound/dollar/euro could help – it
could literally save their life. Others have come along and, even though they
have their own savings and already have medicine, decide to join the crowd
and demand some of yours. […] Now, after you have given out the 100
pounds/dollars/euros, plus your own family’s savings that would have pro-
vided them with medicine when they got sick, and the rest of the crowd who
have gone without your generosity then ransack your house, take everything
you own, smash the place up and burn it down, what do you do next?
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, goodoldboy82)
Another more recent metaphor in the migration discourse evokes (online) gam-
ing scenarios and correlates with the topos of “economic burden”. The migrant
journey is compared to a game and migrants to gamers who know “how to play
the system”, that is, how to receive benefits from the welfare state without being
entitled to them.
(10a) They know all about their ‘human rights’ before they come here, and
police and the law mean nothing to them when they come from lawless
societies. They will have been taught how to ‘play the system’ to get exactly
what the want. If our government could only see that the ‘carrot’ that draws
them here is the benefits they are assured of, and the freedom they will
enjoy, with no ‘tough laws’ to worry about. […] If politicians would take
away the ‘carrot’ of automatic benefits, and adopt a far tougher stance – like
bringing in the army to defend our country, with orders to shoot anyone
who tries to force their way in then this unholy mess might just begin to
subside! (Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Kate)
(10b) […] Look at their faces.It is all one big laugh for them evading the under-
manned French Police force. It is a just another game for them.Getting one
over on all of us tax payers.Grinning all the way to the benefits and hous-
ing departments. […]
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, oh dear 10)
80 Monika Reif
(10c) Looks like good fun to some of them.

(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, squarepeg)
Not seldomly are migrants’ outward appearance, mimics and gestures (e.g. cloth-
ing, facial expressions, hand gestures towards the police) in the photo footage
accompanying the news articles seen as “proof ” that they are not actually fleeing
from war or persecution, but that everything is “just another game” and “good
fun” to them, as various Daily Mail commenters remarked.
The gaming idea is taken one step further by commenter Apollo 17, who re-
contextualises the script of the migrant journey by turning it into a computer
game. Elements of a typical computer game narrative are blended with elements
of the “migrant journey” script.
(11) It would be a good idea for a computer game I see it now, ‘new life’,like gta
but you have to get through the tunnel,negotiating police and border
patrols,to the promised land,also multiplayer as you team up and become
part of a swarm! (Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Apollo17)
The title “New Life” is probably chosen in analogy to the online virtual world
“Second Life”, in which the users create avatars and get them to engage in educa-
tional experiences, start businesses, build their dream homes, and socialise with
other “residents”.29 The storyline developed in the comment above involves vari-
ous Britain-specific steps, e.g. getting through the Channel Tunnel, and the char-
acters have to overcome several obstacles, e.g. negotiating with the authorities.
Britain, once again, is conceptualised as the “promised land”, and it is implied that
the goal of the game is to reach the promised land. The players are allowed to
“team up”, forming a “swarm” in the process, a term that is intentionally used here
in reference to former British PM David Cameron’s comment on ITV in July 2015.
Through this conceptual blend, the migrants’ situation becomes fictionalised and
their struggles trivialised. In the world of gaming, players can easily manipulate
their environment, and the cost of failure is to go one level back in the game. Not
only does the comment above downgrade refugees to players who are just having
a bit of fun playing the “New Life” game, but it also plays down the actual risks of
the migrant journey (including death) to a considerable extent.
3.2.2 Mixed metaphors and their argumentative function

What is striking in the corpus at hand is the fairly frequent occurrence of mixed
metaphors. It needs to be noted, though, that this paper takes a rather liberal view
on what can be subsumed under “mixing”. In line with Barnden (2016), both par-
allel mixing and serial mixing are taken into account here. While parallel mixing
29. Consult the official website <https://secondlife.com/> for a more detailed description.
entails that “the same target A is viewed both as B and as C more or less at the
same time in a piece of discourse, with B and C being distinctly different source
subject matters”, serial mixing involves what Barnden calls “metaphor chaining”,
that is, “A is viewed as B where B is in turn viewed as C” (ibid.: 76). A case that is
not included in Barnden’s account but still considered in this analysis is the use
of the same source in order to conceptualise two different targets (more or less)
simultaneously.
In the majority of instances of mixing attested in this corpus, the source
domains involved in the mix are well-established domains in the discourse history
of migration metaphors. We find combinations of container and natural dis-
aster, natural disaster and invasion, invasion and animal, animal and
nation body, amongst others. More often than not, these mixed metaphors are
at first glance “imagistically incompatible”, as Kövecses (2016: 5) puts it, and a
number of questions arise: Why are such seemingly incongruent combinations
selected at a particular point in the discourse? Do the incongruencies need to be
resolved by the reader in order to attain comprehension of the intended message?
To what extent may the creation of such mixed metaphors (as well as the discourse
participants’ reactions to them) be able to feed into the ongoing debate on the cog-
nitive processing of metaphor?
Both linguistic and cognitive metaphor theories have run into difficulties
explaining why metaphors are mixed in discourse, and furthermore why the mix-
ing rarely causes breakdown of communication or even difficulties in understand-
ing. It has been argued that if verbal metaphoric expressions do indeed activate
an underlying conceptual system during discourse, this should hinder discourse
participants from combining metaphors with inconsistent aspects of semantic
and pragmatic meaning, instead supporting the use of further linguistic items
related to the same conceptual metaphor (cf. Kövecses 2016: 3; Müller 2016: 38).
Several possible explanations have been put forward to account for the occur-
rence of mixed metaphors, each of them focusing on different levels of language
(e.g. the clause level; the distribution of metaphoric expressions across conversa-
tion turns), context (e.g. the immediate co-text; the wider discursive context), and
cognition (e.g. imagistic (in)congruence; (non-)deliberateness of metaphor use).
Kimmel (2010: 110) suggests that “many mixed metaphors are processed
unproblematically because the grammatical structure of the passage exercises little
pressure to integrate them conceptually”. According to Kimmel, the less connected
and embedded the clauses are within which the clashing metaphors appear, the
less necessity there is to resolve the clash. Cameron (2016), after examining how
people use mixed metaphors in the flow of situated talk, argues along similar lines.
She finds that metaphor clusters do not seem to pose a hindrance to compre-
hension but should rather be viewed as “discursive resources that contribute to
82 Monika Reif
the flow of jointly-constructed meaning” (ibid.: 17) – for instance because they go
hand in hand with a shift in discourse topic or because they happily combine into
more complex, more or less coherent metaphorical scenarios. Cameron claims
that from a discourse-dynamics perspective, the perception “that our multiple
metaphors sometimes seem to clash is mostly an illusion perceived from outside
of discourse” (ibid.: 29). A similar conclusion is reached by Müller (2016), who also
focuses on the meaning and function of metaphors in a specific discourse context.
Based on the observation that “people attend to meaning in a dynamic and flexible
manner, responding to the moment-by-moment affordances of the communica-
tive encounter they are immersed in”, Müller suggests that mixing metaphors is “a
consequence of shifting one’s attention to uncommon aspects of metaphoric mean-
ing” (ibid.: 31; emphasis added). That is, the mixing of metaphors is supposed to
“change the semantic salience structure, creating different versions and degrees of
activated metaphoric meaning” (ibid.: 32).
While in Müller’s account, only selected and non-conventionalised facets
of the source and/or target are activated or foregrounded in mixed metaphor
production and comprehension, Kövecses (2016) assumes that entire conceptual
domains may enjoy different levels of activation in natural discourse. To account
for the fact that most language users are not bothered by the seeming incompati-
bility of domains involved in mixed metaphors, Kövecses suggests that “the vari-
ous (near-)adjacent source domains are [only] activated to a low degree. This way,
the low level of activation for a given source does not interfere with the low level
of activation of another source” (ibid.: 11). Finally, the notion of deliberateness is
addressed by Steen (2016: 114), who claims that conceptual clashes between adja-
cent metaphors only get noticed if the two (or more) conflicting metaphors are
“used deliberately as metaphors”.
Whilst it is sometimes difficult to decide for the corpus examples at hand
(i) if the metaphors used are intended as metaphors (cf. the definition of ‘mixed
metaphor’ by Steen 2011, 2017), and (ii) if the reader is even expected to concep-
tually integrate the information involved in the mixed metaphor, we can at least
try to find evidence in the co-text as to whether the mixed metaphors (including
potential semantic clashes) are perceived as such by looking at the discourse par-
ticipants’ reactions to them. Let us first consider instances of mixing where the
items are syntactically integrated (e.g. NP postmodified by PP) or directly related
to each other (e.g. subject [agent] + verb [action performed by agent]).
(12a) Describing them as a swarm was correct – unpalettable to the hand
wringers and do gooders but there is no stopping them – like an army of
locusts.
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, Weir Engineer; emphasis
added)
(12b) This is an invasion and not a crisis. It’s like a swarm of crickets invading
Europe, causing mayhem and upset in our western societies.
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, saynomore666; emphasis
added)
(12c) How else can you describe the hordes of pests that are mustering with intent
to invade the UK.
(Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, RWP; emphasis added)
The examples above are representatives of animal + invasion mixing and seem
to pose little cognitive challenge to the reader, or at least we can find no indication
of perceived incongruity in the subsequent comments. There may be several rea-
sons for that: Firstly, verbs such as invade and muster can generally be used with
both human and animal agents/patients. A COCA collocates search reveals that
the noun slot in front of invade can be filled with human agents (such as army,
troop, soldier, enemy and neighbor) as well as animal agents (such as insect, ant,
bee, coyote, snail and worm). Likewise, the verb muster (in its sense of ‘gather in
one place’) can be found both in military contexts (e.g. with nouns like army,
militia, squad, infantry) and in farming contexts (e.g. to muster horses, sheep, cat-
tle, storks). Therefore, it makes no significant difference whether the source con-
cept or the target concept of the migrants are animals metaphor is more salient
to the text interpreter when processing the mixed metaphor, since both domains
can be readily combined with lexical items from the domain of invasion. Sec-
ondly, the expression “an army of locusts” (Joel 2, NIV ) might already be familiar
to those well-versed in the Bible, and it does not take too much imagination to
conjure up an image of locusts equipped for warfare wearing helmets, carrying
spears, etc.
(13) this is all caused by Merkel …she threw the doors wide open, so they all
started to flood there, now she slams them shut and leaves all the countries
en-route the Germany to face the consequences
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, WorkingBloke; emphasis
added)
Equally unproblematic is this combination of containment and natural disas-
ter, which stretches across several clauses and evokes a fairly elaborate script. First
the German government propagates an “open house” policy, throwing the doors
to their country wide open (= allowing refugees to enter Germany unbureaucrat-
ically) and giving migrants an incentive to flood there (= to move there in large
numbers); then they slam the doors shut (= tighten border controls and reject cer-
tain groups of asylum seekers), which causes difficulties to those countries located
en route to Germany. The container and water metaphors work well together since,
84 Monika Reif
as we all know, a container can only hold a limited amount of water before it
bursts; likewise, anyone inside the container (in our scenario, the in-group) is
at risk of drowning when water masses enter the confined space. Imagistically,
this mixed metaphor does not seem to disrupt online processing either because
the compatibility of the two conceptual metaphors allows for their imagery to be
simultaneously activated and to become integrated into one scenario.
However, the same cannot be said for the following example of mixing:
(14) These useful idiots of the West are currently destroying European civiliza-
tion by encouraging and demanding permissiveness and openness regard-
ing the mass immigration wave that is invading Europe.
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, Melissa Mészáros; emphasis
added)
Although the natural disaster metaphor (“wave”) and the invasion metaphor
(“is invading”) are common to the migration discourse, a combination of the
two may lead to cognitive dissonance. The verb invade does not usually collocate
with the noun wave and it is difficult for the reader to mentally picture the
scenario. The question arises, therefore, why a noticeable number of metaphor
instances in the corpus involve such mixed metaphors. Considering the co-text
of the metaphor within the turn above (“these useful idiots of the West”, “are […]
destroying European civilization”; emphasis added), as well as the contents of fur-
ther turns by the same author, the most likely explanation seems that the mixed
metaphor is supposed to reinforce the threat scenario. That is, the wish for dra-
matic effect justifies the merger of two seemingly incompatible metaphors which,
however, can traditionally be found with the topoi of threat/danger and quantity/
numbers. The argumentative aim thus appears to be more important here than
the internal coherence of the mixed metaphor itself.
Based on multiple instances in the corpus where the mixing of metaphors
seems to have a primarily hyperbolic function, more precisely the effect of exag-
gerated enlargement, I would like to propose the following: By combining two
metaphors that either exaggerate the dimension of migration and/or implicate a
negative view of migration, the language user emphasises his/her emotional ori-
entation, i.e. negative stance and maybe even outrage, towards this state of affairs.
According to Claridge (2011: 20), hyperbolic expressions do not just have a quan-
titative meaning, but also some kind of qualitative value in that language users
“communicate their emotional orientation, as a rule positive or negative evalua-
tion”, towards a certain state of affairs.
While hyperbole is one means of intensification in the sense of gradability, […] it

is also intensification in the emotional sense, i.e., emphasis or what Labov (1984)
calls ‘intensity’. Emphasis as such is not dependent on a degree scale, but gener-
ally heightens the force of the proposition and marks the intensity of speaker
involvement and commitment. This means that while the speaker is certainly not
bound to the literal meaning of his utterance, s/he is committed to the deeper
emotional and interactional, thus social, truth of the statement. Emphasis or
intensity is an automatic effect of hyperbole and certainly its raison d’être […].
(Claridge 2011: 12)
Potential semantic incongruities involved in the mixed metaphors, as well as

obvious discrepancies between the hyperbole and the situation “in reality”, are
accepted by the text interpreters if they recognise the main function of the expres-
sion, namely to emphasise a point and at the same time convey an affective stance.
Henkemans (2013: 5), who investigates the role of hyperbole in the argumentation
stage, suggests that arguers resort to hyperbole for the sake of making a strong
case (cf. also van Eemeren & Houtlosser 2002), since the amplification of cru-
cial aspects of the argumentation might make them appear more forceful and
strengthen the argument.
(15a) A police boss last night called for the British Army to be sent in to halt the
flood of migrants trying to swarm through the Channel Tunnel at Calais.
(The Sun, 29 July 2015; emphasis added)
(15b) Isn’t it outrages how all the exodus of people have mentality they they have
right to invade sovereign countries […]”
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sept 2015, NE123rdLane; emphasis
added)
Exaggerated enlargement is also the main point in these two examples, where
the expressions “the flood” (of migrants) and “the exodus” (of people) are both
used with a quantifying function. The fact that a flood cannot swarm through the
Chunnel and an exodus cannot invade a foreign country is neglectable because
the original lexical meanings of flood and exodus are backgrounded here. Seman-
tically, the head of the prepositional phrase is turned into a quantifier and the
reader connects the verb (to swarm, to invade) to the prepositional complement
(migrants and people, respectively).
Lastly, the corpus contains quite a few examples where the same source
domain is used in order to conceptualise two different targets. While in some of
the examples, the same aspect of the source domain is profiled in connection with
the targets, in others different facets and associations are highlighted.
(16) Merkel has opened the floodgates, and wave of humanity is now washing
over Europe – humanity with a way of life almost diametrically opposed to
Europe’s.
(Guardian, comment section, 20 Sep 2015, Goldenbird; emphasis added)
86 Monika Reif
The first clause in Example (16) contains a metaphor that seems to be internally
consistent. The expression to open the gates indicates that the E.U. is construed as
a container with boundaries and with openings through which external entities
may enter into the confined space. Due to the choice of the compound noun
floodgates, further aspects are added, namely the large quantity in which external
forces are spilling in, the desire to protect what is within the container from exter-
nal danger, and the possibility of disastrous consequences if the inflow does not
abate eventually. The fact that a specific agent, i.e. German chancellor Angela
Merkel, is mentioned who “has opened the floodgates” gives us a first hint that the
comment is intended to assign blame to a politician/political party for their open
door ideology and to call for a more restrictive migration policy. One reason for
this demand is explicitly stated in the phrase in apposition: the author describes
the migrants’ “way of life” as “almost diametrically opposed to Europe’s”, thereby
homogenising intercultural differences between diverse migrant groups, on the
one hand, and diverse European communities, on the other hand, and trying to
evoke fear of culture clashes. Interestingly, migrants are referred to as “humanity”
in this phrase, a dissonance which can only be resolved (at least partly) by look-
ing at the previous clause. Here, the writer claims that a “wave of humanity is now
washing over Europe”, a metaphor which can be interpreted in two different ways.
One potential target concept is the so-called German “welcome culture”, a strong
pro-migrant attitude which at least initially received international praise. A sec-
ond reading of the metaphor shifts the focus onto the effects of Merkel’s politics,
namely that a wave of humans (rather than humanity) is flooding Europe. This
second interpretation is then also set relevant in the subsequent phrase, since only
humans, not humanity, can possess “a way of life”. That is, in the mixed metaphor
above the source concept wave is employed to simultaneously evoke images of (a)
a general feeling of kindness and responsibility and (b) large numbers of humans/
migrants spreading across Europe. The reader might further draw the implicature
that (b) is a direct result of (a). In both cases, the same facet of the source domain
is profiled; the writer aims to indicate large quantities by means of the metaphor-
ical expressions wave and is washing.
(17) Bees gather round a honey pot its a known fact – there is no bigger honey
pot for every bee than the UK – vote UKIP or like the bees we will become
extinct! (Daily Mail, comment section, 30 July 2015, ouchagain)
By contrast, in (17) we can witness a shift in focus with regard to the source
domain. Different facets of the same source domain are dynamically fore-
grounded in each the two instances of metaphor use, their salience depending
on the respective target (and the co-text, of course). While the bees gathering
round the honey pot, representing the out-group, are guided by instinct and are
potentially greedy creatures, the bees that are under threat of becoming extinct,
standing for the in-group, are an endangered species in need of protection. That
is, different characteristics of the source are highlighted in different parts of this
mixed metaphor, and the reader is expected to shift from a negative attitude
towards the bees to a positive one. This evaluative aspect is, at least in my view, not
necessarily inherent in the lexical meanings of the word “bee” and the idiomatic
expression “like bees round a honeypot”, but is added in the process of blending
the source and the target at this particular discourse stage. A critical stance
towards the out-group is a prerequisite for interpreting the idiom in a negative
fashion. What this example shows is that rather than being static, metaphoric
meaning does indeed seem to be “the product of a process of cognitively activat-
ing selected facets of source and target” (Müller 2016: 31), and that the mappings
and projections involved seem to be multi- rather than unidirectional, as has
been claimed by Conceptual Blending theorists (cf., for example, Grady, Oakley
& Coulson 1999; Fauconnier & Turner 2003). Further evidence for discourse-
dynamic shifts can be found in the meta-discussions on the (in)appropriateness
of certain metaphors in the context of migration.
3.2.3 Metaphor continuation strategies in reader comments

Interestingly, the corpus data did not provide cogent evidence to support the
claim that the use of conventionalised, potentially discriminatory metaphors such
as an endless wave of refugees in news articles is likely to exert (direct and quan-
tifiable) influence on subsequent debates. If, for example, a news article contained
multiple lexical manifestations of the conceptual metaphor migration is a nat-
ural disaster (such as influx, wave, to flood), this metaphor still would not nec-
essarily turn out to dominate or even show up in the respective reader comment
section. Sometimes, but not always, an individual water-related expression would
be taken up in the discussion, but an obvious trigger effect could not be attested.
At the same time, metaphorical expressions belonging to the migration is a nat-
ural disaster scenario would come up in reader comment sections linked to
articles that themselves did not contain any lexical instances of the sort. Looking
at the internal progression of such online debates, it almost seems as if they have
developed “a life of their own”, jumping from topos to topos, from time to time
resorting to metaphors already entrenched in the migration discourse without the
need for external lexical triggers. Furthermore, those conventionalised metaphors
which can be considered as less extreme (e.g. the above-mentioned water-related
expressions, as opposed to highly derogatory animal or alien comparisons) did
not receive meta-comment, probably due to a previous naturalisation process.
88 Monika Reif
Here, the question arises to which degree, if at all, the source domain is still salient
to the discourse participants.
With more blatantly offensive metaphors, however, we can witness a different
story. Especially if these were uttered by a public persona – an incumbent politi-
cian, a showbiz celebrity – their acceptability would be discussed at great length
in the reader comment sections. In these meta-discussions on (context-)appro-
priate metaphor use, modifications of the original wording or scenario can often
be found, modifications which in themselves seem to function as argumentative
instruments. In the following paragraphs, one specific sub-corpus (labelled the
“swarm corpus”) will be revisited to illustrate to which purposes metaphor con-
tinuation strategies can be employed in argumentative discourse. Special atten-
tion will be paid to discourse-dynamic shifts that highlight or hide certain aspects
of the source/target domains involved. The “swarm corpus” comprises approx-
imately 3,000 reader reactions posted in the wake of former British PM David
Cameron’s “swarm comment”.
(18) Look, this is very testing, I accept that, because you’ve got a swarm of peo-
ple coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come
to Britain, because Britain has got jobs, it’s got a growing economy, it’s an
incredible place to live. But we need to protect our borders by working hand
in glove with our neighbours, the French, and that’s exactly what we’re
doing.
(David Cameron in an interview on ITV News, 30 July 2015; emphasis
added)
A qualitative analysis of the metaphor continuation strategies used in reader com-
ments has revealed that the discursive moves which could be identified mostly
served a twofold argumentative function: (i) to indicate the commenter’s assess-
ment of Cameron’s word choice, i.e., to serve as a meta-linguistic comment on
the acceptability of the “swarm” metaphor, and (ii) to advocate the commenter’s
stance towards migrants and/or the current migration policy by the government.
At this point, it should already be noted that the majority of comments revealed
either a clear pro-migrant or a clear anti-migrant orientation, with very few of the
commenters adopting a differentiated view of events. Furthermore, consensus did
not seem to be a goal of the argumentative process, with most commenters just
wanting to convey their standpoint and/or express their anger.
In order to indicate approval of the term “swarm” and a restrictive migration
policy, readers would either repeat the exact same wording (“a swarm”, see 19a,b),
use a lexical derivate of the term “swarm” involving a word class shift (see 19c,d),
or enrich the metaphor scenario by adding details about the behaviour of
“migrant swarms” (see 19e). Often, the metaphor would just be repeated; only
rarely would it be accompanied by an explicit evaluation (such as “an accurate

description” in 19b and “an appropriate metaphor” in 19e). In addition to verbally
reconfirming and reinforcing the metaphor, some readers would make reference
to photographic “evidence” in news footage, hence tapping into the idea of seeing
is knowing and the photographic truth claim (see 19a,b).
(19a) looks like a swarm to me …. (Robert Mullan, 31 July 2015)
(19b) I saw them filmed from above and they looked like a swarm to me I’d say
swarm was an accurate description (Shaytan is truth, 2 August 2015)
(19c) Well they are swarming. (Lee Corner, 30 July 2015)
(19d) Happy to see someone else’s country swarmed by these people!
(The Truth, 31 July 2015)
(19e) “Swarm” sounds an appropriate metaphor to me – they want our pollen
and we’re getting stung. (Anonymous, 30 July 2015)
A second strategy used to indicate approval involved a pretended, feigned rejec-
tion of the metaphor, only to suggest an unambiguously discriminatory alternative
instead. This often went hand in hand with a recourse to inflammatory right-wing
populist rhetoric.
(20a) … swarm of migrants is so wrong,the collective noun is a scum of
migrants. (iansmall, 31 July 2015)
(20b) Swarm was a totally inappropriate word. Virus or parasite would be more
accurate. (beastinblack, 31 July 2015)
The play on deliberately profiled and deliberately suppressed aspects of the source
domain seemed to be of central importance in those posts which, on the surface,
looked like the commenter had consulted a dictionary just for clarification of the
term “swarm” and for an objective evaluation of the term. However, by select-
ing or highlighting one specific dictionary definition, the focus was shifted onto
one potential sense extension of the word, pushing the main sense (and all other
senses) into the background and rendering them less salient (see Figure 2). In
some of the comments quoting dictionary definitions, attitude labels such as
“often contemptuous” or “offensive” were deliberately omitted in order to make
the entry fit the argumentative purpose.
Focus shifts were also employed by arguers with a strong pro-migrant atti-
tude, to a different effect of course. In a first step, they would exploit the colloca-
tional structure of the construction “a swarm of X” and insert a specific collocate
into the slot, such as “a swarm of bees” or “a swarm of locusts”. That is, one poten-
90 Monika Reif
Figure 2. Profiling dictionary definitions for argumentative purposes
tial collocational candidate was highlighted while others were backgrounded. In a

second step, a certain facet of the selected concept was profiled in order to make
an argumentative claim. Either positive characteristics of the source domain were
outlined, e.g. “useful things bees”, or negative allusions were rendered explicit,
e.g. “‘swarm’ (of locusts?) maybe using biblical allusion there?”. The conclusions
to be drawn from these focus shifts concern different levels of the migration
debate. In the positive reinterpretation of the term “swarm [of bees]”, the content-
related conclusion “[t]he more the better” is drawn, linking to migration policy,
whereas the negative reading in (22b) leads to the language-related judgement
“[w]eaponized language”, rejecting the metaphor in the context at hand.
(21a) useful things bees. The more the better. (Bev Turner, 30 July 2015)
(21b) ‘Swarm’ (of locusts?) maybe using biblical allusion there? Weaponized lan-
guage. (Shelley Bones, 30 July 2015)
The source concept bees became highly contested ground in the debates. While
the “pro-migrant” commenters would make use of the current media coverage
of pollinator decline, construing bees as useful and endangered species in need
of protection, the “anti-migrant” camp would reference cultural artifacts such as
horror movies and action video games featuring swarms of killer bees, construing
bees as aggressive attackers. The latter construal was then rejected by the “pro-
migrant” side, sometimes by parodistic and hyperbolic scenario continuations
(see 22a,b). In general, what such diametrically opposed construals show is the
multidirectionality of mappings involved in conceptual metaphors. The source
domain does not seem to be pre-equipped with an inherent meaning focus which
is then mapped onto the target domain, but the foci that are selected for mapping
emerge in the discursive context, through the interaction between source and tar-
get and the dynamic creation of salience structures and shifts (cf. also Kövecses
2013: 16–17). Using the terminology of Conceptual Blending Theory, the infer-
ences go from the blended space to both of the input spaces, highlighting spe-
cific shared facets of source and target (cf., for example, Fauconnier & Turner
1998: 25).
(22a) somebody ought to point out to him that they are people and not killer
bees… (Rachel Foote, 30 July 2015)
(22b) soon “Migrants attempt to Zerg Rush us”. (Tomjez, 30 July 2015)
Both pro- and anti-migration arguers seem to excessively rely on already estab-
lished content-related topoi in the migration discourse, in the case of the bee
metaphor on the topoi of “usefulness” and “danger/threat”. The positively/neg-
atively connoted mappings serve as triggers of inferences for supporting a con-
clusion. The topos of “usefulness” has been paraphrased by Reisigl and Wodak
(2001) and Charteris-Black (2014) as follows: If an action (i.e. admitting migrants
into one’s country) under a specific relevant point of view (i.e. the current popula-
tion age structure of the host country) is expected to be accompanied by positive
consequences (i.e. counteracting workforce shortage, strengthening the national
economy), this action should be supported. By contrast, the topos of “danger/
threat” leads to the conclusion that caution and restrictiveness are in order when
it comes to migration because migrant communities may conceal terrorists, thus
posing a threat to the safety of the in-group. These conventionalised lines of argu-
mentation are not explicated in the comments, but the commenters presuppose
the readers’ familiarity with common topoi in the migration discourse, so that
shifting the salience onto one particular facet of the source domain (usefulness vs.
threat) suffices to activate entire argumentative scripts.
(23a) Shoppers swarmed through the opening doors and up the aisle in an effort
to find sale bargains… (John Vorster, 30 July 2015)
(23b) […] Not a single one of these issues appears in any meaningful form. If the
one thing the Labour Party ought to have aplenty, it’s intellectuals. Those
clever people who swarm in higher education and Islington and Camden,
some of whom are very smart and able to think. […]
(Patently (E)uropean, 30 July 2015)
Argumentative scripts can also be triggered by the strategy of re-contextualisation,
which is a further strategy used for interactional positioning. In (23a), it looks – at
first glance – as if the commenter just intended to post a sample sentence contain-
ing the verb “to swarm”. Only against the backdrop of the (revitalised) shopping
92 Monika Reif
metaphor in the current migration debate is it possible for the reader to deduce an
anti-migrant attitude from the comment, substituting “shoppers” with “economic
migrants”, “the opening doors” with “the E.U. borders”, “sale bargains” with “wel-
fare payments”, and so forth. Here, the topos of “economic burden” is activated,
and it can be inferred from this that the commenter embraces the negatively-
connoted term “swarm” in the context of migration. Re-contextualisation could
also be frequently found in comments with an ironic slash against certain (sup-
posedly “pro-migrant”) groups in society, such as left-oriented journalists and
politicians. By quoting stretches of texts in which the term “swarm” is used to
refer to e.g. Guardian journalists or Labour politicians, the commenter leaves the
reader with only two options. Either they would have to admit that the term is
acceptable with human referents, or they would have to deal with the criticism
levelled towards them (see 23b).
(24a) Yes, the media are buzzing about this (David Llewellyn, 30 July 2015)
(24b) Is that a “smarm” of Andy Burnham? Seems to have backfired #Out-
Of Touch (Masamah PAI, 30 July 2015)
Lastly, word play based on metaphorical extensions/polysemy (e.g. “[the media]
are buzzing”) and conversion/blending mechanisms (e.g. “a smarm”) could be
found with quite a few of the comments, mostly with the intent of criticising the
media hype surrounding Cameron’s use of the word “swarm”.
What this analysis of metaphor continuation strategies has revealed is that
language users make creative use of previously instantiated metaphor scenarios
for interactional positioning, both with regard to issues of language use in the
context of migration and with regard to migration policies and migrants. The
table below is an attempt to provide an overview of the various metaphor con-
tinuation strategies employed, the terminology being loosely based on Chilton &
Ilyin (1993), Musolff (2004), Cameron (2008) and Vogelbacher (2019).
Table 2. Metaphor continuation strategies in argumentation

Possible argumentative
Strategy Form functions
Repetition Repetition of the same metaphorical a. Supporting and reconfirming
expression the claim
Use of a lexical derivate b. Rejecting the claim (in cases
of irony)
Extension Use of further metaphorical expressions Elaborating, specifying or
belonging to the same conceptual metaphor modifying the claim
Possible argumentative
Strategy Form functions
Focus shifting Rendering different characteristics of the a. Providing evidence for the
source domain salient claim
b. Rejecting the claim
Re- Re-use of the same metaphorical expression a. Providing evidence for the
contextualisation or a lexical derivate with a different target claim
and/or topic b. Rejecting the claim
c. Creating a humorous effect
Substitution Substitution of the original conceptual a. Proposal of an alternative,
metaphor by a different conceptual more extreme claim
metaphor (hyperbolic function)
b. Counter-proposal to the
original claim
4. Discussion, conclusion and outlook
What the analysis of the present corpus has confirmed is that the majority of
metaphors in recurring cultural discourses such as the migration debate can
be categorised as “discourse metaphors”. That is, the texts are permeated by
metaphorical linguistic expressions which have become conventionalised within
this particular discourse and which point to relatively stable metaphorical map-
pings functioning as key framing devices (cf. also Zinken, Hellsten & Nerlich
2008; for similar findings on the migration debate, see Bennett 2016). Especially
in the actual news reports and feature articles, writers would repeatedly draw
on a restricted set of tokens linked to the natural disaster and invasion sce-
narios. In this respect, the question arises as to which extent the facets of the
source domain which might once have motivated the metaphor are still salient
to the discourse participants. This question would require empirical psycholin-
guistic investigation, and it would be particularly interesting to see if different
groups of discourse participants (i.e. participants with a migrant background vs.
participants belonging to the “in-group”) provide different evaluations of such
metaphors, e.g. with regard to their perceived discriminatory effect.30
30. For a discussion on the possibility of eradicating problematic but ingrained metaphors in
(deliberative) discourses on migration, please see Bleasdale (2008). For a theoretical framework
to study the relations between socio-political discourse and cognition, I would like to refer you
to Van Dijk (2002).
94 Monika Reif
Furthermore, looking at the British migration discourse from a diachronic

perspective, it could be seen that the degree of prevalence of certain conceptual
metaphors varies over time. As Moore (2013) illustrated, the expression “asylum
shopping” entered the political and news discourse surrounding migration in
the early 1990s, peaked in frequency in the early 2000s, and then faded into the
background again. Moore sees the reason for the intermittent popularity of this
metaphor both in the dominating narratives at the time (EURODAC, E.U. asylum
policy) and in underlying culture-specific logics associated with Britain’s post-
coloniality, on the one hand, and its neoliberal modernity, on the other (ibid.: 351,
354–360). The fact that the shopping metaphor seems to be on the rise again in
the current migration debate (starting in 2014/2015) lets us wonder about the con-
ditions of its re-emergence. I would like to argue that the dense interwovenness of
the most recent migration discourse with the Brexit debate has caused the shop-
ping scenario to resurface.
Novel, or at least less common, metaphors could mainly be found in the
below-the-line comment sections. These sections were also more susceptible to
the mixing of metaphors. In the corpus at hand, mixed metaphors seemed to pri-
marily serve an argumentative function. In the majority of instances, the main
point of mixing two conventionalised conceptual metaphors (such as “the mass
migration wave that is invading…”, “a flood of migrants trying to swarm…”) was
exaggerated enlargement. Through hyperbole the arguers tried to strengthen their
point and, at the same time, to communicate their emotive stance towards migra-
tion and pro-migrant policies. Potential cognitive dissonances arising from the
mixing of metaphors that are difficult to conceptually integrate did not seem
to be an issue for the discourse participants; at least they were never explicitly
addressed and the discursive flow was not interrupted by the use of mixed
metaphors. This would speak in favour of discourse-dynamics approaches to
metaphor (mixing), which claim that metaphoric meaning is not static, but arises
in discursive contexts, and that the salience and activation of certain facets of the
source and target domains mainly depend on the co- and context of the metaphor
in question (cf., for example, Cameron 2016; Müller 2016). That is, the source
domain does not seem to be pre-equipped with an inherent meaning focus which
is then mapped onto the target domain, but the foci that are selected for map-
ping emerge in the discursive co- and context, through the interaction between
source and target and the dynamic creation of salience structures and shifts (cf.
also Kövecses 2013: 16–17).
Salience shifts also appear to play a significant role when it comes to metaphor
continuation strategies. In the “swarm sub-corpus”, such shifts were exploited for
agumentative purposes and interactional positioning. The example of the bee
metaphor lends itself well to illustrate this point: Bees have been construed in dif-
ferent ways throughout different cultures, time periods and (art) mediums. The
representation of bees as beneficial pollinators worthy of protection and the rep-
resentation of bees as killer swarms trying to eliminate mankind are certainly
the two extreme poles of the continuum prevalent in many contemporary west-
ern cultures. By shifting the focus onto one of these facets of the source domain
and at the same time backgrounding all others, both the advocates and the critics
of David Cameron’s use of the word “swarm” managed to convey their stand-
point without explicitly commenting on the (non-)acceptability of this term in
the migration context. Moreover, by highlighting certain (positive or negative)
qualities of the source concept, such as “useful things bees” or “the … bee stings”,
topos-related argumentative scripts were triggered, which were then picked up in
subsequent turns of the debate. Especially the topoi of “usefuleness” and “danger/
threat”, both of them very common in the migration discourse (cf., for example,
Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Charteris-Black 2014), were activated by shifting the dis-
course participants’ attention to specific aspects of meaning.
A quite surprising finding concerns metaphor uptake in reader comments.
The hypothesis that migration metaphors used in news articles may exert direct
influence on the rhetoric of the below-the-line debates to follow could not be
confirmed by the data. While it is certainly true that some of the conceptual
metaphors and metaphorical expressions overlapped in the two sub-corpora, con-
crete trigger effects between an article and its associated comment section could
not be attested (the only exception being the meta-linguistic debate on David
Cameron’s use of the swarm metaphor). Instead, the metaphors employed in
reader comments seemed to be largely governed by the argumentative topoi of the
migration debate. However, since mass media texts reach a large segment of the
population and to some extent also determine the private discourse on migration,
it is immensely difficult, if not impossible, to decide what exactly motivated the
choice of metaphor X at a particular stage of the discourse.
Lastly, and somewhat sadly, it was striking that apart from the ‘bees = useful’
comments, the corpus barely held any appreciative metaphors relating to
migrants. Of course, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau wisely observed, “[t]he hardest
things to observe are those which one sees every day”, so there might be a chance
that some positively-connoted metaphors have been overlooked during the close
reading of the material. Nevertheless, also judging from the findings of other
researchers – and there exists quite an extensive body of literature on contem-
porary migration rhetoric, migration metaphors included – there does indeed
seem to be a tendency for metaphors used in public discourse to negatively
96 Monika Reif
frame migrants.31 A few exceptions in which metaphors construe migrants more

favourably, e.g. as guests, as valuable commodities or as victims in need of assis-
tance, are referenced in Taylor’s (2021) diachronic study on migration metaphors
in the Times Online corpus and in Boeva's (2016) analysis of British and American
news sources. Such representations were absent from the present corpus, though,
which ties in with Taylor’s observation that the guest metaphor is mainly used to
refer to past migration movements rather than recent or still ongoing ones, and
with Bennett's (2016) hypothesis that the nature of the migration discourse always
shifts in reaction to specific events. Since there is preliminary evidence of exist-
ing discrepancies between metaphors used in self-representations by migrants
and migration metaphors used by/in the mainstream media (cf., for example,
Catalano 2016), one desideratum for the future would surely be to find more
migrant voices – including their preferred metaphorical framings – represented
in news texts and public discussions on the topic.
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Conceptualization of goat in West African
Englishes
Kader Baş Keškić
This chapter takes a Cultural Linguistics approach to research on World

Englishes and is primarily concerned with the use and variation of animal
metaphors in West African Englishes, namely Nigerian and Ghanaian
English. In order to provide a sound basis for the aspects of variation, other
varieties of English such as British English, Tanzanian English, and Kenyan
English will be included as points of reference. In this way, this research
intends to reveal the role of different cultural settings on the usage of
figurative language in general and variation of animal metaphors in
particular, taking the conceptualization of goat as the immediate case in
point. The current dataset includes the components of the Corpus of Global
Web-based English (GloWbE) and the International Corpus of English
(ICE) pertaining to the aforementioned varieties of English. Therefore, the
main methodological approach follows corpus linguistic analyses of the
data. The results show both similarities and differences in the ways that
goats are conceptualized in these varieties. Close examinations of figurative
usages of goat expressions further contribute to the study of metaphor
variation in Englishes spoken around the world.
Keywords: Conceptual Metaphor Theory, cognitive sociolinguistics, World

Englishes, West-African English, animal metaphors, cultural
conceptualizations
1. Introduction
Cognitive Linguistics (CL) is the study of the way in which features of language
reflect certain aspects of human cognition, and research into metaphor within CL
provides a fruitful area of inquiry to explore the link between language use and
the human conceptual system. The publication of Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff
& Johnson 1980) paved the way to the study of metaphor from a cognitive per-
spective which considered metaphor not only as a matter of language, but also
and foremost as a matter of thought. This perspective gave way to Conceptual
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.04kes
106 Kader Baş Keškić
Metaphor Theory (CMT), the theoretical and empirical framework of which has
encouraged a wealth of interdisciplinary studies.
Large amount of research on metaphor from various disciplines has also
induced several criticisms to CMT. These criticisms mostly gather around the
idea that CMT emphasizes the embodied nature of metaphor while neglecting the
existence and importance of variation that occurs across cultures and languages.
The focus on embodiment further stimulates the focus on universal metaphors,
again overlooking the interplay between language and culture. On the other hand,
CMT does not contradict the socio-cultural aspect of metaphor use and under-
standing. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggest that we cannot separate our cultural
assumptions, values and attitudes from our bodily experience, since our culture is
intrinsically tied to our experiences. They argue that “the most fundamental val-
ues in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fun-
damental concepts in the culture” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 22). These perspectives
on the cognitive theory of metaphor and its application inspired many scholars to
investigate the effect of culture on metaphorical language use and different aspects
of its variation.
One of the major recent developments in this respect can be found in the
emergence of Cognitive Sociolinguistics that investigates language variation by
converging the methods and theories developed within Cognitive Linguistics and
Sociolinguistics (Kristiansen & Dirven 2008). The common interests of the two
fields, such as their usage-based commitment, contributed to the emergence of
this synthesis. In this respect, Cognitive Sociolinguistics is not only concerned
with the structure of language but also the applied aspects of language use. This
interdisciplinary characteristic of the field aims at understanding the construction
and variation of meaning while explaining the possible reasons for variation
across languages and cultures (Pütz, Robinson & Reif 2014).
In the larger framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, studies to date have con-
centrated on lexical, semantic, constructional, and pragmatic variation. Lately, the
studies have focused also on metaphor variation in cultural contexts (Kövecses
2000, Sharifian et al. 2008). This line of research seeks to show how metaphorical
mappings differ across social and cultural groups in particular and in terms of cul-
tural conceptualizations in general. In this way, the cognitive sociolinguistic per-
spective on metaphor further emphasizes the significance of cultural background
for the interpretation of metaphors and cultural conceptualizations. Within the
field of World Englishes, this perspective has been applied in several book-length
publications (Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009; Onysko & Callies 2017; Callies & Degani
2021). Given the main objectives of cognitive sociolinguistic research, one of the
major contributions of its application to the World Englishes research lies both
in its cognitive and cultural focus on the conceptualizations underlying language,
highlighting the systematic use of language while demonstrating variety-specific

structures.
Cultural conceptualization research in World Englishes is a popular area of
inquiry within Cultural Linguistics, which, as a general research field, investigates
the relationship between language and cultural conceptualizations. Cultural con-
ceptualizations refer to the ways in which members of different cultures construe
their worldviews, thoughts, feelings and experiences (Sharifian 2015). This line of
research mainly focuses on the identification of cultural conceptualizations in a
given variety of English and its respective culture. World Englishes offer rich data
in order to study the relationship between language and cultural conceptualiza-
tions. The growing body of research in the field continues to provide insight into
varieties of English.
In view of these theoretical frameworks, this study aims at investigating fig-
urative conceptualizations of goat in West African varieties of English, namely
Nigerian and Ghanian English. Aspects of variation will be explored with regard
to other varieties of English such as British English and East African Englishes.
With this scope, the present chapter investigates the cognitive view of metaphor
in relation to culture as well as its cognitive sociolinguistic and cultural linguistic
explorations in World Englishes. The methods applied in this chapter provide a
better understanding of the use and variation of metaphor in English-speaking
contexts.
2. The use and variation of metaphor
The relationship between metaphor and culture has long been discussed within
the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Kövecses (2005) elaborates on the effect
of culture on the use of figurative language and discusses the cross-cultural and
within-culture dimensions of variation as well as the possible aspects of such vari-
ations. With regard to Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that conceptual metaphors are
based on universal bodily experiences, Kövecses (2005: 4) states that universal
experiences does not necessarily lead to universal metaphors, and metaphors are
not only based on bodily experience but also cultural practices. Moreover, he also
expresses that primary metaphors are not necessarily universal just as complex
metaphors may potentially show universality. Against the background of these
views, metaphor variation can be seen as a continuum, where the variation may
occur at the conceptual level or at the level of metaphorical linguistic expressions
(Onysko 2017).
In light of the recent advancements in the field, one of the earlier works pub-
lished in the field is a book-length research conducted by Hans-Georg Wolf and
Frank Polzenhagen (2009) which introduces a cultural model of community in

African varieties of English by investigating the kinship concepts. The purpose of
their research is stated as a contribution to the newly emerging field of Cogni-
tive Sociolinguistics and its application to the World Englishes (WE) paradigm.
Farzad Sharifian (2003, 2006, 2008) proposed a cultural linguistic perspective to
the study of cultural conceptualizations in World Englishes. Looking into kinship
terms and the category of family in Aboriginal and Australian English, he finds
culturally shaped usages and understandings of such terms between the two com-
munities. A recently published special issue presents a wide range of studies on
metaphor research within the framework of World Englishes with a special focus
on metaphor variation (Callies & Onysko 2017).
Despite the growing body of research exploring the use and variation of
metaphors from cognitive sociolinguistic and cultural linguistic points of view in
World Englishes, only a few of these works actually focus on the use and varia-
tion of animal metaphors in varieties of English. To the best of my knowledge,
none of these studies provides a closer look at the use of expressions pertaining
to the concept of goat. This is very surprising considering the productivity of the
concept of animal and of its metaphoric extensions, especially the human is ani-
mal metaphor. The existence of this metaphor in different varieties of English as
well as different languages and cultures has been documented in several case stud-
ies such as the cross-cultural study of animal metaphors in English and Persian
(Talebinejad & Dastjerdi 2005), the conceptualization of monkey in West African
Englishes (Fiedler 2016), the entailments of the people are animals metaphor in
Zulu (Hermanson & Du Plessis 1997), the use of animal metaphors for the rep-
resentation of women in Bukusu and Gusii proverbs in Kenya (Barasa & Opande
2017), the realization of the a man is a lion metaphor in Mandarin Chinese and
British English (Lixia 2011), to name a few. This common metaphor entails that
the notion of conceptualizing human beings in terms of animals occurs across
languages and cultures. This also presupposes the conceptualization of animals in
terms of human beings, as the characteristics attributed to animals do not reflect
actual behavioral patterns of animals but the way they are perceived by humans.
That is, initially, the concept of human is mapped onto the concept on animal,
which is then mapped back onto the concept of human.
Based on this overview, a few questions will be addressed within the frame-
work of this paper: (i) what types of expressions occur that pertain to the domain
of goat in these varieties, (ii) to what extent are these expressions used figura-
tively, (iii) in what ways do these figurative expressions reflect cultural values,
(iv) how do these cultural conceptualizations contribute to the study of metaphor
variation in varieties of English.
3. Data and methodology
CMT provides both a theoretical and an empirical framework for the study of
metaphor. As stated earlier in this paper, CMT has been criticized for its the-
oretical framework. Further criticism was directed to its empirical status, espe-
cially with respect to the method of analysis. Some scholars complained about the
lack of clarity regarding the methodological steps followed in identifying and/or
extracting metaphors. Keeping these criticisms in mind, methodology is one of
the focal points of this chapter in that I will try to clearly lay out the steps taken
for the analysis of the data. First, I will introduce the type of data used for the
analysis.
The current dataset consists of selected components of the International Cor-
pus of English (ICE) (Greenbaum 1996) and the Corpus of Web-based Global
English (GloWbE) (Davies 2013; Davies & Fuchs 2015). The ICE components
analysed in this study are ICE-NG and ICE-EA, representing Nigerian English
and East African Englishes (comprised of Kenyan and Tanzanian English). As
widely known, each component of the ICE consists of one million words of spo-
ken and written language, which may be challenging for a comparative study of
low frequency items. Therefore, GloWbE, a larger source, is also included. This
web-based corpus comprises 1.9 billion words derived from 1.8 million web pages
written in twenty different varieties of English. The parts included in the present
study are the downloaded versions of the Nigerian and Ghanaian English sub-
corpora of GloWbE and its British-English component. The Nigerian compo-
nent comprises approximately 41 million words while the Ghanaian components
has approximately 37 million words. Being the largest sub-corpus of GloWbE, the
British component contains nearly 388 million words. As British English is used
as a reference point in the present study, only selected phrases that were deemed
to be prominent in the other components are analyzed. A list of these phrases is
presented in the following section.
When working with GloWbE, one needs to keep in mind the limitations of
this corpus, such as duplicates and issue of authenticity. As the corpus is web-
derived, it is possible that certain webpages appear in more than one variety. Even
though the compilers are working on improving this situation, it still continues
to be a point of concern. Another issue that is harder to control is to make sure
that the webpages belong to the respective countries in the corpus. In an attempt
to compensate for this problem, the compilers provide the users with hyperlinks
to the original sources of the articles. It is, however, overwhelming and time-
consuming to manually check each and every source for authenticity. Moreover,
some of these links have already disappeared. Despite these limitations, GloWbE
remains a good source for the study of metaphor use and variation in Englishes
around the world, as it provides a large amount of data to work with and conduct
comparative analyses.
Since this study aims at identifying conceptual metaphors in corpora, the
main methodological approach is a corpus-based analysis of the data. Corpus-
based research on metaphor has gained importance over the last two decades
(as in other areas of linguistics). With more and more corpora being available,
the empirical basis for metaphor research has enlarged significantly, and corpus-
linguistic tools offer multiple and new ways of studying conceptualizations across
languages and cultures (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2006). In order to conduct the pre-
sent analyses, the latest version of the WordSmith tools was utilized (version 7.0).
These tools allow the analyst to create word lists and keyword lists and conduct
concordance analysis. There are also a number of utility programs embedded in
the tool for further analyses.
Since this study focuses on the figurative conceptualizations of goat, the initial
step was to determine the frequency of the given lexical item using the aforemen-
tioned tools and programmes. This analysis was conducted for the item goat and
its plural form goats for each component included in this study. The next step
was a manual extraction of the metaphorically-used words in all the corpora. The
identification of metaphors followed the guidelines of the Metaphor Identifica-
tion Procedure Vrje University (MIPVU; Steen et al. 2010), which was developed
from the earlier Praglejazz Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP; Pragglejaz
Group 2007) developed to identify metaphorically-used words in discourse. A
unique contribution of the MIPVU is the inclusion of “like” as a metaphor signal;
it inspired the addition of “like (*) goat(s)”-searches in the present analysis of
GloWbE-GB, which yielded a larger but still manageable number of tokens for the
study. In a final step, the metaphorically marked expressions were further grouped
in terms of their source and target domains. In the following section, I will discuss
the most frequent source and target domains involved in the formation of the
metaphorical goat expressions identified in the data.
4. Analysis of the data: The use of goat metaphors
In this section, I will present the results and discuss them along the lines of the
theoretical and empirical frameworks introduced so far. As stated earlier in this
paper, this study focuses mainly on uncovering the cultural conceptualizations of
goat in West African varieties of English, namely Nigerian and Ghanaian Eng-
lish. The coexistence of local languages and English in these countries provides
a diverse linguistic and cultural setting for the development of their varieties of
English, which allow the speakers of these varieties to express themselves in a
unique way. In Kachru’s (1985) Three Circles model, both Nigerian and Ghanaian
varieties belong to the outer circle, which is the most dynamic one. This dynamic
nature of the new Englishes has been further emphasized by cyclic models (see
Schmied 1991; Schneider 2003, 2007). Despite the diversity of these settings, one
can still expect to find many similarities, and one may assume an inventory of
common metaphors that have been adopted from English and many others that
have emerged independently of this influence. In this regard, it is my intention
to explore to what extent the people speaking different varieties of English share
their metaphors and in what way they differ from each other.
Table 1 presents both the raw numbers of occurrences of the items under
investigation and their frequencies per 1 million words for the total number of
occurrences in each component. As we can see in the table, these items most
frequently occurred in the East African component of the ICE corpus. This is
followed by the ICE-NG, GloWbE-NG, GloWbE-GH, and GloWbE-GB, respec-
tively. These numbers are important as a starting point, as the frequency of items
is an indicator of cultural keywords, which “can be studied as focal points around
which entire cultural domains are organized” (Wierzbicka 1997: 16).
Table 1. Overview of the occurrences of the items per component

Corpus goat goats total per million words
GloWbE-NG 571 385 956 22.41
GloWbE-GH 349 328 677 17.46
GloWbE-GB 1760 1248 3008 7.76
ICE-EA 26 61 87 61.07
ICE-NIG 42 9 51 50.30
Table 2 shows the number of figurative uses of the items under investigation.
Although ICE-EA had the highest frequency of goat(s), only one token was
metaphoric. The highest percentage of metaphoric usages appears in the Nigerian
component of the ICE corpus. It should be noted, however, that all of these tokens
occur in the same text, which revolves around a conversation between a lion and a
goat. Therefore, the numbers do not tell us whether this is the conventional usage
of the item in actual discourse in the said variety. This serves as another justifica-
tion for the inclusion of GloWbE or other large corpora for the investigation into
figurative language use, particularly with regard to low frequency items.
Table 3 shows the list of search items used to analyze GloWbE-GB, their
raw frequencies, the number of metaphorically used expressions, and the per-
centage of these expressions relative to the total number of tokens. This list was
put together after the metaphor identification procedure was completed for both
GloWbE-NG and GloWbE-GH and is restricted to the most salient expressions
and phrases found in the other two components. It includes expressions following
the [like a/an/the + animal name(s)] formula.
Table 2. Overview of the number of figurative uses of the items per component
Corpus goat goats total %
GloWbE-NG 287 91 378 39.53
GloWbE-GH 113 55 168 24.81
ICE-EA 1 0 1 1.14
ICE-NG 30 6 36 70.58
Table 3. Frequencies of the search items in GloWbE-GB

Raw Metaphoric Metaphoric usage
Search item frequency usage (in %)
he-goat(s) 3 1 33.3
she-goat(s) 14 2 14.2
sacrificial goat / to sacrifice a/the goat(s) 21 12 57.1
separate the sheep from the goat 3 3 100
scapegoat 1424 1196 83.9
like * goat(s) 30 16 53.3
During the initial identification process, there were several instances of non-
figurative conceptualizations of goat that provided insight into certain cultural
practices and inspired further research into conceptualizations of goat. It is
important to present such examples, too, since they constitute the wider concep-
tual background to figurative uses. For instance, in ICE Nigeria, one of the texts
reviews a song which depicts a tradition of slaughtering a goat to welcome a bride,
in a ritualistic, celebratory fashion.
(1) …the goat that would be slaughtered the day following the dusk that the bride
was brought. (ICE_NG)
In a similar vein, there is another tradition which requires the groom to bring four
goats as “bride price” to the family of the bride.
(2) First when you’re going to meet them you take beer and take four goats one
the people eat and the other three are kept. (ICE_EA)
In both examples, goats serve as a part of the ‘bride price’ as stated in the source
text of Example (2). The following example refers to a ritual that needs to be per-
formed in order to avoid bad luck.
(3) He had to sacrifice a goat or else bad luck could befall him. (ICE_EA)
Non-figurative examples show that goats play an important role in certain cultural
practices and rituals that are performed in both East and West African cultures.
Such examples encountered in the ICE corpora have stipulated the inclusion of
larger data. The data, obtained from GloWbE Nigeria and Ghana, demonstrated a
variety of conceptual metaphors and underlying cultural conceptualizations that
involve the lexical items in question. The following sections will take a closer look
at the examples from the corpora and discuss them within the framework of this
paper.
4.1 The great chain of being metaphor
The productivity of the human is animal metaphor across languages and cul-
tures, as illustrated in earlier research in the field, is considered to arise from
the fact that this metaphor is so easily accessible, as it is grounded in the great
chain of being metaphor (Lovejoy 1936; for a cognitive-linguistic elaboration,
see Lakoff & Turner 1989). The Great Chain places God, angelic beings, humans,
animals, plants, and minerals in a hierarchical order. In this order, humans
occupy a unique position, connecting the world of spiritual and earthly beings.
They are spiritual beings, just like angels, tied to a physical body which separates
them from the spiritual world. They also possess characteristics similar to the
animals, such as pain, hunger, and sexual desire (Lovejoy 1936). Furthermore,
the great chain metaphor incorporates a moral matrix that ascribes a division
between the good and the bad. This matrix can be presented as the reason for the
negative attributes demonstrated in certain animal expressions and animal labels
as swear words when used especially with reference to humans. As morality is
deeply affected by culture, this matrix adds to the aspect of cultural variation.
Depending on the prevalence of this ideology, we can expect to find many
similarities in conceptualizing animals across varieties of English, as well as dif-
ferences. The results show several examples of the continuity and productivity of
this notion in the varieties under investigation. It appears in the form of com-
parisons, which is only logical considering that it represents a hierarchical order,
emphasizing the power of humans over animals, animals over plants, and plants
over inanimate objects. Given the lexical items central to this research, the com-
parisons usually occur in the form of humans vs goats, goats vs other animals, he-
goat vs she-goat, and dead/dying vs living goats. Even though the juxtaposition
of humans with goats was observed in all the varieties, the distinctions between
goats and other animals, he- and she-goats, and dying/dead vs goats that are alive
were mainly identified in the African varieties. Each of these occurrences refers
to different concepts, providing a deeper insight into the cultural models that are
arranged around these concepts.
(4) A story of a young girl who is tied like a goat and wiped along the way to a
man she never loved for marriage. (GloWbE_GH)
(5) Look at the way his people are been slaughtered like goats in their land and
yet he cant talk. i have no regard for him. (GloWbE_NG)
(6) They will massacre them like goat. (GloWbE_NG)
In Examples (5) and (6), the speakers talk about people who were cruelly killed.
Example (4) expresses a more specific situation in which a young girl is forced
to marry a man whom she does not love. Therefore, all three examples convey a
similar meaning, which can be classified under the domain of animals for con-
sumption, as these people were treated like goats that are tied, slaughtered, and
massacred to meet the needs of people. In this case, the notion of the Great Chain
leads to unequal treatment among humans, as the conceptualization of humans
in terms of animals may entail a “lower” position for specific humans or social
groups. This view is represented both in Nigerian and Ghanaian English.
Further examples that describe specific cultural and religious practices hint-
ing at the attitudes towards goats and their role especially in Nigerian culture were
identified.
(7) No wonder they are killing all you IBOS like christmas goat in the north
because you don’t base nor moral standing or common front.
(GloWbE_NG)
(8) When pronouncement was made in court, his client was shivering like Chris-
mas goat. (GloWbE_NG)
One of such practices reveals goats as Christmas food. Example (7) refers to the
large number of goats consumed on this occasion, which indirectly alludes that
Igbos are potentially killed in a celebratory manner. A similar reference was made
in Example (1). Example (8) draws upon a first-hand experience of observing a
goat's fear before it is slaughtered, which may be taken as proof for the ubiquity of
this practice.
As stated earlier in this paper, many of the metaphorical goat expressions are
used to conceptualize different concepts by stressing different forms of juxtaposi-
tions. In the following sections, the most prominent concepts that are referred to
will be discussed in detail.
4.2 Gender and sexuality
The metaphorical goat expressions identified in the corpora, in many cases, rests
on the division between he- and she-goat. This division, with reference to sexu-
ality, highlights promiscuous behaviour. In other cotexts, it usually marks the
gender of the addressee, but may also refer to an unpleasant behaviour or charac-
teristic. It should also be noted that such uses were mainly identified in Nigerian
English (e.g. Example (9)). There was only one instantiation of he-goat in Ghana-
ian English. In the British English component of GloWbE, he-goat was used three
times, while there were 14 instances of she-goat, and only one instance of each item
was used metaphorically (cf. Table 3).
(9) No matter how good and beautiful, caring and precious the woman is the he-
goat will still do the ultimate search. (GloWbE_NG)
The he-goat in this example portrays a man who is in a relationship but is not
loyal to his partner. This seems to be the typical man who is referred to as a he-
goat in several examples encountered in Nigerian English.
(10) How could I tell him that what I needed was a he-goat, nose in the air, mad
with lust. (GloWbE_NG)
In Example (10), this characteristic seems to be referring to female sexual desire
in general rather than promiscuous behavior.
Other uses of the he-goat pose a general negative connotation of unpleasant
behaviour of men and do not necessarily refer to sexuality. Below is such an exam-
ple emphasizing this view with a proverbial expression.
(11) If one kills an animal that defiles is harmful to the earth, he should first kill
a he-goat. (GloWbE_NG)
In addition to the usage of he-goat, there are a few instances of she-goat in the data.
In some cases, this expression was used to mark the gender of a person, while
in others, it was used to emphasis an undesireable behavior or undesireable
characteristic of a woman as well as promiscuous behavior. However, few
of these instances referred to sexuality. In the following Example (11), the expres-
sion is used only to mark the gender of a person.
(12) A she goat doesn’t suffer in its parturition when an elder is at home.
(GloWbE_NG)
In this proverb, the conceptual metaphor is simply a woman is a she-goat. In

the following Examples (13), (14), and (15), different characteristics are conveyed
through the employment of she-goat.
(13) She will continue to suffer frustration which has lead her into running about
seeking 4 attention like she goat on heat period, homeless she goat.
(GloWbE_NG)
(14) […] dirty smelling she-goat! (GloWbE_NG)
(15) A woman who does not have no respect or value fellow women […]. A dis-
grace frustrated she goat. (GloWbE_GH)
On a general note, the division between he- and she-goat serves as a marker for
the gender of a person who is conceptualized as a goat. What is interesting is that
this division does not seem to be necessary when referring to concepts other than
sexuality. This holds true for the case of he-goat, which conveys a negative mean-
ing. On the other hand, the usage of she-goat does not necessarily refer to the sex-
uality of a woman. Another interesting aspect here is that she-goat, when used to
mark only the gender of a person, can convey a neutral meaning, which exhibits
the only neutral meaning of the conceptualization of humans in terms of goats
identified in the data.
Other binary expressions compare the value of goats in the society to other
animals. These expressions include a comparison between goats and sheep, which
are mainly used in religious contexts, while others compare the value of goats to
that of cows, which are usually employed in political contexts. Although the divi-
sion between goats and sheep was observed in both Nigerian and Ghanaian Eng-
lish, the comparison between goats and cows was only present in the Ghanaian
corpus. The next section will illustrate the conceptualizations of goats with refer-
ence to religion.
4.3 Religion
One of the important cultural aspects reflected in the expressions presented in

this section is that we get an insight into the different religions that are practiced
in the region where the varieties included in the study are spoken. According to
the reports of the Association of the Religion Data Archives, Christianity is the
dominant religion in both Nigeria (48.8%) and Ghana (59.6%). Islam is the sec-
ond most practiced religion again both in Nigeria (43.4%) and in Ghana (19.9%).
Ethnic religions are reported to be practiced less compared to these two dominant
religions with 7.4% in Nigeria and 15.5% in Ghana. The dominance of Christianity
can be observed in the Englishes spoken in both countries, especially in figura-
tive forms. There are references to goats in relation to Islam and ethnic religions
mostly in non-figurative ways that explain certain practices performed along the
lines of these belief systems. Such expressions include:
(16) Muslims sacrifice a goat or a sheep on the eve of Eid-al-Adha to commemo-
rate Prophet Ibrahim’s [the rest of the sentence is not provided in the
source]. (GloWbE_GH)
(17) The most important aspect of Saturday’s ceremonies is the killing of a goat
(to-gbemi) in the night. The parent of every dipo girl presents a castrated
goat for a sacrifice. […]. The ritual is believed to wash away anything that
will prevent their growth into womanhood and motherhood.
(GloWbE_GH)
(18) Before Irosun-Meji came to the world he was advised to make sacrifice with
a cock and a tortoise to the misfortune divinity and a he-goat to Esu.
(GloWbE_NG)
In all three examples, we can observe the non-figurative conceptualization of
goats as sacrifice. Their figurative counterparts are rooted in the biblical com-
parison of the faithful sheep and the sinful goat. Most of such instances describe
the day that Jesus will ‘separate the sheep from the goat’. In the Bible, this occasion
is already described metaphorically, as it conceptualizes humans in terms of sheep
and goats. More specifically, this analogy conceptualizes faithful people in
terms of sheep and sinful people in terms of goats, giving way to the concep-
tual metaphors faithful people are sheep and sinful people are goats.
The following Examples (19)–(21) include direct quotations from the Bible
and incorporate comments of the writers on the kinds of people that represent
goats and sheep.
(19) Matthew 25: 32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall
separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the
goats: 25: 33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats (those
who “act the goat”) on the left. (GloWbE_NG)
(20) It is only through Jesus that we can enter the gates of God’s presence (John
10: 7–10) because he is the good shepherd. As the good shepherd he only
shepherds sheep, never goats. Goats unlike sheep walk on different paths of
life with the aim of seeking God. But they never get to know Him.
(GloWbE_GH)
(21) Matthew 25: 14–30 When the Son of Man comes in his glory with all of his
angels, he will sit on his royal throne. The people of all nations will be
brought before him, and he will separate them, as shepherds separate their
sheep from their goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on
his left. (GloWbE_GB)
(22) The goats go to the left hand while the lamb go to the right hand.
(GloWbE_NG)
(23) They are the goats on the left side of Jesus, and not the sheep on the right
side of Jesus. (GloWbE_NG)
(24) He gave a parable about the judgment seat where the sheep will be separated
from the goats. (GloWbE_GH)
As the portrayal of goats in the Bible is a negative one, one might think that most
of the negative connotations of the metaphorical goat expressions are grounded
in this view. However, the non-metaphorical expressions presented in other reli-
gious contexts do not hold a negative stance towards goats. This gives substance
to the idea that animal metaphors do not reflect the real attributes of animals but
their perceived characteristics.
Another religious reference encountered in the data arises from the frequent
use of scapegoat. This concept appears in several religious texts going back to the
book of Leviticus to the Bible. A scapegoat is defined as ‘one of two goats that was
chosen by lot to be sent alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having
been symbolically laid upon it, while the other was appointed to be sacrificed’ and
further explained as the ‘one who is blamed or punished for the sins of others’
(OED online). The examples identified both in the Nigerian and the Ghanaian
component refer to the book of Leviticus.
(25) All the sins of the house of Israel committed in the year were confessed by
the high priest upon the head of a goat – the so-called scapegoat. This scape-
goat, as it were, bore all the sins of the people of Israel committed in the year
and was sent by a vibrant, strong, and youthful man into the wilderness, far
away from human habitation , to be left there of its fate under the burden of
the sins of the people (Leviticus 16: 10, 21–22). (GloWbE_GH)
(26) Lev 16: 8 And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord,
and the other lot for the scapegoat. (9) And Aaron shall bring the goat, upon
which the Lord’s lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. (10) But the goat
on which the lot fell to be scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the
Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat
into the wilderness. (a) The second offering was two goats, which was a sin
offering for the people. The two goats combined one offering for the people.
One was slain and its blood sprinkled on the mercy seat. The sins, which
were now atoned for, were symbolically placed on the head of the live or
‘Scapegoat’, which was led out in the wilderness by a fit man.
(GloWbe_NG)
The occurrences identified in both varieties hold the same meaning also in every-
day language.
(27) By examining the national character of the Igbos, and the stereotypes that
grew around their business activities, he carefully shows us the historical
process via which the Igbos became the national scapegoat; we see how one
section of the country practiced what he calls “transferred malice”, where
the Igbos were singled out for punishment during troubles in which they
only played a bit part. (GloWbE_NG)
(28) Jose Bosingwa has been under fire recently by fans and pundits alike for his
recent performances. Is the criticism valid or is he simply being used as a
scapegoat for the poor performances of Chelsea? Let’s take a look at the sta-
tistics… (GloWbE_GH)
The figurative uses of scapegoat in a religious context were observed only in the
British component, with reference to Jesus. The conceptualization of Jesus (and
his followers) as goat clashes with the conceptualization of sinful people are
goats presented earlier in this section. It also clashes with the general conceptu-
alization of Jesus as a lamb, as lambs (or sheep) represent concepts opposite to
goat, i.e. innocence and deviation, respectively.
(29) The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat
for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have
been contemplating in the future. (GloWbE_GB_G)
(30) And the scapegoat couldn’t be just anybody. The sin was so great that only
his son (or God himself, depending on your Trinitarian theology) would
do. (GloWbE_GB_G)
Moreover, this item does not always appear in the form of scapegoat but more fre-
quently in the variants scape goat, scape-goat, and escape goat in both varieties.
The latter variant reflects the original meaning of scapegoat: it derives from the
archaic verb scape, meaning ‘escape’, and is based on a misreading of the Hebrew
Azazel, meaning ‘the goat that departs’ (Merriam Webster Dictionary Online).
(31) Ndigbo who librated Nigeria from slavery, you turned and made them
escape goat in all Nigeria problems. (GloWbE_NG)
(32) Mixed feeling that something went wrong and this poor man is an escape
goat, jona loves his wife and did not want to use his wife and he used his
brother, all this politicians sold and exchanged their soul and their loved
ones for power.all of them in that aso rock are heavy ritualist but na only
GOD pass them. (GloWbE_GH)
(33) We advise the Nation’s Labour leaders to critically examine the policies of
governments (Federal and State) that impinge on the well-being of the peo-
ple instead of looking for scape-goat for cheap populism. (GloWbE_NG)
(34) According to him, the danger of the scenario was that people will now tend
not to attach any importance to statements made by Mr. Anyidoho. He fur-
ther stated that President Mills can not claim he was unaware of the pur-
ported suspension of the ECG boss as stated by Mr Anyidoho and believed
that the Communications Director at the Presidency was being used as a
scape-goat. (GloWbE_GH)
(35) We all know, all these officials are into big time fraud, but due to the pres-
sure coming from their bosses, they had to find a scape goat.
(GloWbE_NG)
(36) The case of the former Sports minister is not tenable because he was not a
member of their Party the NPP and thus they were more comfortable to
make him a scape goat. (GloWbE_GH)
(37) If we do not do this we will see anyone who is trying to mitigate loss and
save life using disaster and risk prediction suddenly become much more
wary of being hunted down and used as a scape goat to alleviate political
pressure. (GloWbE_GB_B)
The formal variants of scapegoat present in all the varieties preserve the original
meaning. Hence, we can talk about a general conceptualization of a person who
is punished for the wrongdoings of others as a goat. Even though its non-
figurative origin rests upon the concept of sacrifice, when used figuratively, its
meaning revolves around the concept of injustice. Moreover, Examples (31)–(37)
provide a straightforward transition to the following section since they are used
to refer to politics, which has been a recurring point of reference thoughout the
data.
4.4 Politics
Among the several areas in which goat expressions were commonly employed,
politics shows a wide range of conceptualizations both in Nigerian and in
Ghanaian English. According to the results, most of the metaphorical goat

expressions are used in political contexts in both varieties. This brings out both
similarities and differences in terms of the phrases used to conceptualize insti-
tutions, policies, political parties, and politicians. Prevalent among goat expres-
sions in this realm are those comparing goats to cows. This is more dominantly
observed in Ghanaian English. Many examples to be presented here also exhibit
a high degree of idiomaticity.
To begin with, below are some examples that illustrate the expressions
emphasizing the difference in attitudes towards goats and cows.
(38) Strange is the word. But, in the world of make-beliefs that enveloped the
whole presidential concept, everything was possible. Remember this! In the
three and a half years of the Czar’s reign, the official concept was that a goat
is a cow. (GloWbE_GH)
(39) Baba Jamal had counseled employees of Ghana’s Ministry of Information,
so they want non-NDC observers to also draw the same conclusions that
they are seeing a cow instead of a goat? (GloWbE_GH)
As can be deduced from these two examples, cows are valued more than goats
in Ghanaian society. We cannot get a glimpse of the reason why based on these
examples; however, a proverb identified in the Nigerian component provides a
form of explanation.
(40) The poor person’s goat is his cow: We are proud of our possessions no mat-
ter how small they are.
(We are proud of our belongings however unimportant.) (GloWbE_NG)
This proverb also comes with an extended explanation which describes goats as
‘small’ and ‘unimportant’ in comparison to cows. Even though there is a posi-
tive encouragement towards owning a goat rather than a cow provided by this
proverb, this analogy becomes negative when applied to the context of politics.
Based on this view, one can provide a better explanation for the Examples (38)
and (39). Therefore, ‘a goat is a cow’ policy depicts a political situation in which
an ‘unimportant’ act is presented as a significant one or a poor execution is
overlooked. This can also be interpreted as referring to the concept of corrup-
tion, which is not uncommon when metaphorical goat expressions are employed
in political contexts. This is illustrated by Example (41), using a proverbial goat
expression.
(41) It is laughable that the Nigerian House of Representatives do not yet under-
stand that the child of a goat would always be goat. How would a corrupt
panel deliver an incorrigible report. (GloWbE_NG)
corruption seems to be a dominant concept in the political context in the

Ghanaian component and referred to by different proverbial goat expressions.
(42) An old Ghanaian proverb advice goes like this, “What tastes very sweet in a
goat’s mouth is what pains or burns his backside when it is coming out”.
(GloWbE_GH)
(43) As nobody saw him or had a hint of it he went ahead chewing the state
money “grabu grabu grabu” like goat chewing salt forgetting that it was
going to burn his asshole when coming out one day right? (GloWbE_GH)
In Example (43), we see an interpretation of the proverb mentioned in Exam-
ple (42). This proverb refers to a situation in which something pleases at first, but
its pleasantness might hurt in the end. In Example (43), we see that what the goat
eats is salt, which stands for money in this case. The person who has access to
state money uses it for his own benefit, which probably ‘tastes very sweet’ in the
beginning, but once this situation becomes public one day, it will hurt his career.
In this regard, this politician has corrupt ways of handling the state money. There
is a further conceptualization in play here, namely the money is food metaphor.
The prevalence of this particular conceptual metaphor has been pointed out in
other works in the field, especially in terms of its use in the political context in
West African varieties (see Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009; Fiedler 2016).
Another proverbial expression that stresses the dichotomy between dead and/
or dying goat and a living goat was found to dominate the political discourse in
Ghana.
(44) So, what was Vice-President Amissah-Arthur expected to do?; go down
into the gutter with Bawumia, who, more or less, is a dead goat so has noth-
ing to fear. (GloWbE_GH)
(45) Desperation is setting-in with Nana Addo as he is now exhibiting the final
kicks of a dying goat. (GloWbE_GH)
As can be seen in the Examples (44) and (45), a goat can occur both in the form of
a dead and a dying goat. A full version of this proverb was mentioned in another
text in the Ghanaian component, and the saying goes “a dead goat doesn’t fear
knife”. On a general note, this proverb depicts a person who has nothing to lose
and thus is unafraid of what comes their way. When this view is used in the con-
text of politics, politicians who are conceptualized as dead or dying goats are pre-
sented as people who are already aware of the fact that they are going to lose their
positions; and thus, behave recklessly towards this end.
5. Discussion and conclusion
The results presented so far have identified a wide range of uses of figurative goat
expressions in both Nigerian and Ghanaian English, evoking different concepts
such as the ones discussed in this paper. Some of these conceptualizations refer to
culture-specific values and practices while others can be considered as represent-
ing shared conceptualizations. As discussed earlier in this paper, the human is
animal metaphor is accessible across languages and cultures through the great
chain of being metaphor. The human is animal metaphor generates several
entailments, including human behavior is animal behavior and further spe-
cific realizations (such as promiscous behavior is goat behavior) that are real-
ized and/or elaborated in both similar and different ways.
As the analysis demonstrates, the religious metaphors presented in the chap-
ter are generally based on Christianity, which is the dominant religion practiced
both in Ghana and Nigeria. This shared view of a belief system yields a shared set
of conceptual metaphors such as faithful people are sheep and sinful people
are goats. Another expression with a religious origin is scapegoat. This phrase
was identified in all three varities in various forms. Although its meaning arises
from a religious context, its most frequent reference is not religious when it is
used metaphorically. Christmas goat is another expression that is rooted in reli-
gious practices. Based on the results, this expression, unlike the previous ones, is
observed only in the Nigerian English data. Cultures vary as to what is tradition-
ally eaten on specific occasions such as Christmas. In the Anglo-Saxon culture, for
instance, it is common to eat turkey on this occasion. The examples show that the
practice is different in the Nigerian culture, featuring goats instead. When used
figuratively, the underlying mappings can be formulated as humans killed bru-
tally are goats slaughtered for christmas and frightened humans are
christmas goats.
A prominent aspect of the conceptualizations of goat manifests in the use
of he- and she-goat. While he-goat is more salient in Nigerian English, the use
of both he- and she-goat is observed in both varieties. Metaphorical conceptu-
alizations of he-goat are mostly utilized in the context of sexuality, generating
the metaphors promiscuous behaviour of a man is the behaviour of a he-
goat and a man with sexual desire is a he-goat. According to the Great
Chain, sexual desire is associated with animal attributes; therefore, it is not sur-
prising that sexual desire is conceptualized in terms of an animal. Other uses of
he- and she-goat allude to a more general concept of undesirable behaviour
or undesirable characteristic, and these concepts are elaborated in various
ways. Kövecses (2002: 125) discusses the dominance of the notion of undesirabil-
ity with reference to the human is animal metaphor, specified by the use of she-
goat in both Nigerian and Ghanaian English.
We have seen so far that many expressions derive from proverbs. Most prover-
bial expressions are used in the context of politics and often relate to the concept
of corruption. As Fiedler (2016: 208) points out, many African countries strug-
gle with the issue of political corruption. Given the fact that proverbs are an inte-
gral part of the African oral tradition, it is inevitable to make use of proverbs when
talking about such issues.
In conclusion, both Nigerian and Ghanaian speakers of English use a variety
of different conceptual metaphors. Some of these metaphors are shared by the two
African varieties included in this study. Others show similarities to those that are
used in more traditionally norm providing varieties like British English. More-
over, goats are conceptualized in a more distinct way in the African context. The
linguistic and cultural diversity of both countries might have contributed to the
diversity of goat metaphors used in these varieties. A deeper investigation into
the aspects and dimensions of variation could provide a better understanding of
the cultural models that produce the identified cultural conceptualizations.
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Cooking verbs and the cultural
conceptualization of cooking processes
in Japanese
Natsuko Tsujimura
Indiana University - Bloomington
This chapter provides a semantic analysis of Japanese cooking verbs in

comparison with English counterparts. It will be shown that some of the
semantic components that are lexicalized (or incorporated) to form a verb’s
meaning reflects a cultural conceptualization of food preparation. Building
upon Lehrer’s (1972) analysis of Japanese cooking verbs but further revising
it, the chapter will showcase relevant aspects of a culturally constructed
conceptualization of food preparation reflected in the Japanese language.
Interestingly, a comparison between Japanese and English appears to show a
relatively meager inventory of cooking verbs in Japanese. However, while
Japanese may have a more limited number of cooking verbs in which
semantic components are lexicalized, the language makes available other
linguistic means such as use of mimetics and compounding that detail the
cooking process. These additional mechanisms help maintain the broad
range of fine-grained descriptions pertinent to the cooking process, while
simultaneously preserving a culturally constructed conceptualization of
food preparation.
Keywords: componential analysis, compounds, cooking verbs, cultural

conceptualization, Japanese, lexicalization, mimetics, semantic field
1. Introduction
Cultural Linguistics provides a theoretical and analytical framework that is instru-

mental to exploring the relationship between language and cultural conceptual-
izations (Sharifian 2011, 2017). Food and foodways (i.e., specific eating habits and
culinary practices) in general are a straightforward realm of analysis from this
perspective since they are very culture-specific not only in the type of food one
consumes but in the language that is used to describe food tastes and cooking
methods. One classic area of discussion regarding linguistic variation stemming
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.05tsu
128 Natsuko Tsujimura
from various ways of cultural conceptualization is demonstrated by lexicalization

patterns exhibited with cooking verbs and the classification of semantic fields that
taste descriptors and their extensions show. As Adrienne Lehrer’s series of works
discuss in detail (e.g. Lehrer 1969, 1972, 1975, 1983, 2009), the componential analy-
sis has proven to be effective in making important generalizations in these areas.
Lehrer’s examinations demonstrate that cooking verbs in languages are highly
structured and are subject to linguistic analysis. Meanings of the cooking verbs
can be dissected, and semantic components can be considered relevant to captur-
ing similar and different meaning characteristics among each other.
In this chapter, by comparing Japanese cooking verbs with English counter-
parts, I foreground intriguing ways in which culturally constructed conceptual-
izations of food preparation interact with general and language-specific linguistic
mechanisms. A componential analysis in part accounts for similarities and differ-
ences in lexicalization patterns between the two languages, but I further discuss at
least two sources of cross-linguistic variability: (i) when two cultures do not share
an identical cooking-related concept (i.e. a new concept to the other culture), and
(ii) when one culture shows a more narrowly defined version of a shared concept.
In each case, language-specific linguistic tools that are available in the language
come into play to compensate for the apparent lexical gaps. All these provide
an additional reminder that semantic components of cooking verbs highlight the
close interaction between culturally grounded concepts and a coherently struc-
tured lexicon.
2. Analysis of cooking verbs in Japanese
2.1 Componential analysis
Scholars who are concerned with lexicalization patterns have examined how
meaning components are internally specified as part of semantic properties or
externally expressed as periphrastic collocates, for instance (e.g. McCawley 1968;
Slobin 1996, 2006; Talmy 1985, 2000) (cf. Jackendoff 1990; Pustejovsky 1995).
Research on motion verbs, for one, has identified a set of core concepts – such
as figure, path, ground, manner, and cause – that are commonly associated with
motion events among languages, while examining the range of typological varia-
tion as to whether each concept is internally lexicalized or externally expressed.
In a similar vein, cooking verbs constitute an interesting area for furthering our
understanding of regularity and diversity in lexicalization patterns. Additionally,
as will be demonstrated below, cooking verbs offer another semantic field for
investigating the way in which cultural conceptualizations of culinary traditions
Cooking verbs and the cultural conceptualization of cooking processes in Japanese 129
and practices are realized as linguistic components that are built into semantic
properties of individual lexical items and the relations among them.
With this general premise in mind, I shall start with Lehrer’s work on cooking
terms (Lehrer 1969, 1972). Lehrer examines cooking verbs in English and other
languages through componential analysis. In this approach, meanings of verbs
are dissected, and semantic components are recognized that are relevant to cap-
turing similar and different meaning characteristics among them. Examples of
components include, but are not limited to, [+/− Liquid] (use of water), [+/−
Direct] (use of direct heat), [+/− Vigorous] (vigorous vs. gentle cooking action),
and [+/− Long Time] (long vs. short cooking time). Sample components, indi-
cated in terms of positive vs. negative feature values, and relevant English verbs
are given in (1), based on Lehrer (1969).
(1) a. use of water (wine, milk, etc.): boil ~ grill
[+Liquid] v. [−Liquid]
b. use of fat: fry ~ boil
[+Fat] v. [−Fat]
c. direct or radiated heat v. conducted heat: broil ~ bake
[+Direct] v. [−Direct]
d. vigorous v. gentle cooking action: boil ~ simmer
[+Vigorous] v. [−Vigorous]
e. long v. short cooking time: stew ~ parboil
[+Long time] v. [−Long time]
f. large amount v. small amount of some substance: deep fry ~ sauté
[+Large] v. [−Large]
g. additional special purpose:
[+To soften] → stew
[+Preserve shape] → poach
[+Rack or sieve] → steam
etc.
For instance, these semantic components distinguish between boil and grill in the
use of liquid (as in (1a)), between broil and bake in the presence of direct heat (as
in (1c)), and boil and simmer in the involvement of a vigorous cooking action (as
in (1d)). The list of components can include special features like [+To soften] for
stew that indicate purposes, and necessary utensils such as [+Rack or sieve] for
steam (as in (1g)). Combinations of these components lead to a lexical organiza-
tion based on semantic relations like hyponymy, synonymy, and incompatibility.
As we shall see below, the componential analysis provides a helpful apparatus
in analyzing cooking verbs within an individual language as well as comparatively
across languages. In addition, as Lehrer argues in her series of work on the topic,
componential analysis offers several more general advantages since it can apply
to not just cooking terms but to the vocabulary in other semantic fields. First,
although the way in which individual vocabulary items are grouped into semantic
fields may not be identical across languages, the set of components (or semantic
features) such as presence of liquid, presence of fat, and direct heat for cooking
terms, provides basic tools to capture the systematic patterning of semantic fields.
This further indicates that word meanings are not random, and that words can
achieve a highly structured organization based on their meaning components.
Second, as the sentences in (2) show, linguistic anomaly can be attributed
to inconsistency between the lexicalized semantic components and externally
expressed collocations.
(2) a. *Saute the soup.
b. *Steam the vegetable in a large amount of oil.
According to Lehrer’s analysis, sauté has the features of [+fat] and [+solids], the
latter of which is incompatible with the choice of direct object in (2a). The verb
steam is analyzed into [+non-fat liquid], [+vigorous action], [+solids], [+rack,
sieve (kind of utensils)]. The prepositional phrase “in a large amount of oil”, in
conflict with the feature [+non-fat liquid], leads to an anomaly. So, the range of
collocational restrictions of the type shown in (2) mirrors the semantic compo-
nents that are internally lexicalized as the meaning of a given vocabulary item.1
Third, semantic components and semantic relations are systematically trans-
ferred in metaphorical extension. For example, if one member of hyponymy is
metaphorically used, other members tend to be metaphorically extended in a sim-
ilar way. To illustrate, hyponyms of “cook” include boil, simmer, steam, stew, and
burn, all categorized under the semantic field of cooking, and these hyponyms
can be extended to the semantic field of emotional states, describing anger and
agitation. This is shown in (3).
(3) a. His comments made me boil. [+vigorous action]
b. His criticism burned me.
c. His feelings kept simmering after our fight. [−vigorous action]
Interestingly, the semantic components that define a verb under the field of cook-
ing carry over when it is categorized under the field of emotional states. For exam-
ple, boil and simmer contrast in the feature of [+/−vigorous action] in the field of
cooking. Webster’s College Dictionary definitions include “to be agitated, as with
1. On the other hand, the acceptable sentence “Poach the fish in olive oil”, where the com-
ponent [+non-fat liquid] associated with the verb poach is incongruous with “olive oil”, may
suggest the degree of the anomaly may change depending on various adaptations in culinary
methods within the society.
rage” for boil and “to be about to break out, as in anger, revolt, etc.” for simmer as
extended meaning in the emotion field. These dictionary definitions of boil and
simmer seem to reflect the degree of emotional intensity when they are extended
to the field of emotional states. That is, the level of emotional intensity of boil as in
(3a) is likened to the vigorous action characterizing boil used as a cooking verb;
in contrast, simmer in (3c) resembles the emotional build-up sustained for some
time without a vigorous outburst parallel to the cooking method denoted by the
same verb.
Turning to her taxonomy of cooking verbs, Lehrer (1972) recognizes at least
35 cooking verbs in English and compartmentalizes them through componential
analysis. For instance, boil1, boil2, simmer, stew, poach, braise, parboil, steam, and
reduce are categorized under one type of cook (i.e., cook1), all sharing the most
basic characteristics of [+non-fat liquid] and [−fat]. However, they are further
distinguished from each other in other specific features such as [+/−vigorous
action] (e.g. [+vigorous action] for boil2, steam, and reduce; [−vigorous action]
for simmer, stew, poach, and braise), [+/−long cooking time] (e.g. [+long cooking
time] for stew; [−long cooking time] for parboil), and additional special purposes
(e.g. [+soften] for stew; [+preserve shape] for poach; [+reduce bulk] for reduce).
Combinations of the components, then, are formed into a coherent lexical struc-
ture, making clear their mutual semantic relations like hyponymy, synonymy,
antonymy, and incompatibility. Lehrer’s (1969) analyses of cooking verbs in Eng-
lish are represented by the partial summaries in Tables 1 and 2.
Table 1. Partial summary of Lehrer’s (1969) classification under cook

cook
boil1 fry broil bake
simmer (full) boil sauté French- fry grill barbecue plank roast shirr scallop
(boil2) pan-fry deep-fry charcoal
<Table 2>
Table 2. Summary of Lehrer’s (1969) classification under boil1 (unmarked)

boil1 (unmarked)
simmer boil2 (full boil – marked)
poach stew parboil steam reduce
braise
Under the unmarked boil1 category in Table 2, poach and stew are hyponyms
of simmer. That is, poach and stew are types of simmering. In contrast, Lehrer
notes that verbs in the same row are incompatible if they are divided by vertical
lines. So, by this token, simmer and boil2 are in the semantic relationship of
incompatibility.
2.2 Revised lexical organization of Japanese cooking verbs2
Using the same methodology, Lehrer (1972) further compares cooking terms in
nine different languages: English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Jacaltec,
Yoruba, Navajo, and Amharic. In what follows below, I will focus on her analysis
of Japanese cooking verbs and attempt to revise and refine it. Central to our dis-
cussion are Japanese verbs that refer to the cooking processes requiring the use
of heat and liquid. In my refinement of Lehrer’s original work, I shall take into
particular consideration various fine-grained semantic features that can be attrib-
uted to the culturally grounded concepts of cooking processes that are unique to
the Japanese culinary tradition. In her original analysis of Japanese cooking verbs
that denote the use of water, Lehrer (1972) gives the componential analysis of (4)
and organizes them into a taxonomy laid out in Table 3. My reanalysis of Lehrer’s
table is summarized in Table 4 although an additional refinement will follow. It
should be noted that the English translation of each verb is only for convenience,
as the exact semantic nature rooted in localized culinary conceptualizations will
be elaborated on during the course of the discussion.
(4) niru ‘boil’: [+water, +submerged]
musu ‘steam’: [+water, −submerged]
yuderu ‘boil’: [+water, +submerged, +long cooking time, +special food (eggs)]
taku: <niru followed by musu>
2. The reworking of the classification of Japanese cooking verbs based on Lehrer’s original
analysis expands on the taxonomy in Tsujimura (2018b) and is further refined in Tsujimura
(2023). There are several reasons to frame my analysis in a componential approch. First,
Lehrer’s series of work on cooking verbs provides the sole instance of a lexical semantic
analysis of Japanese cooking verbs. The componential analysis adopted there simultaneously
gives preliminary descriptions of the verbs’ semantic properties and places Japanese in a
typological/taxonomical map. My discussion takes her analysis as a starting point and thus
continues to use the same analytical frame. Second, although componential analysis per se
may be considered dated, a group of semantic approaches that share similar conceptual tenets
(e.g., the literature that I have cited on lexicalization or incorporation earlier) has been actively
subscribed to. Third, the range of Japanese cooking verbs examined in this chapter may well
be analyzed under prototype theory, but my discussion primarily focuses on specific lexical
semantic components that are attributed to a culturally constructed conceptualization, rather
than the recognition and degree of prototypes that generally capture cooking processes.
Table 3. Partial summary of Lehrer’s (1969) analysis of Japanese cooking verbs

niru ‘boil’ musu ‘steam’
yuderu ‘boil’ taku
Table 4. Reanalysis of Japanese verbs of cooking with liquid

wakasu ‘boil niru1 ‘boil’ musu ‘steam’
water’
yuderu niru2 ‘boil in taku ‘boil+steam hukasu ‘steam (potato,
‘boil’ special broth’ (rice)’ pumpkin)’
yugaku
‘parboil’
The four verbs in Lehrer’s componential analysis in (4), which have been
organized in Table 3, share the feature [+water] as they all require the use of
water. As is the case with English boil and steam, their Japanese equivalents, niru
and musu, contrast in the feature of [+ or – submerged]. Lehrer analyzes yuderu
rather narrowly, only referring to the boiling process of eggs, and the associated
bundle of features indicate that specificity. Finally, taku is another specific verb
to describe the two-step process of cooking rice, namely, niru ‘boiling’ followed
by musu ‘steaming’. Just to give a brief initial overview of my reanalysis as sum-
marized in Table 4, three verbs are added to Lehrer’s list, wakasu ‘boil water’,
yugaku ‘parboil’, and hukasu ‘steam’. The two verbs yuderu and niru2 are already
included in Lehrer’s table, but below I will discuss reasons for the reversed seman-
tic relationship between the two. Finally, while basically following Lehrer’s analy-
sis of musu ‘steam’ and taku ‘boil+steam (rice)’ maintaining their lexical hierarchy,
I will suggest further elaborations. In my discussion of these Japanese cooking
verbs, I wish to draw particular attention to the ways in which the Japanese cook-
ing process is conceptualized differently from parallel situations in other culinary
cultures, giving rise to verbs that may not have identical or similar lexical forms in
other languages.
The eight verbs in Table 4 are coalesced into a larger group of cooking proce-
dures that are uniquely characterized by the required use of heat and non-fat liq-
uid such as water and broths of various sorts. Since there is no further elaboration
needed for the use of heat, the feature specification of [+heat] will not be men-
tioned in my discussion below. Starting with the top row in Table 4, while niru1
‘boil’ is presumably the most general, all three verbs refer to a cooking process
requiring non-fat liquid: water most commonly for niru1 (although see the dis-
cussion of niru2), and exclusively for wakasu ‘boil water’ and musu ‘steam’. The
degree of intensity in the cooking process as a whole ranges from gentle to vig-
orous, but all instances initially involve vigorous boiling so that the water reaches
the boiling point. The rigorous boiling of the water is also required by the process
of musu, but the major difference between niru and musu is whether ingredients
are submerged in the water: niru is marked for [+submerged] and musu for [−sub-
merged].
The verb wakasu is interesting in that it refers only to the process of boiling
water. That is, nothing – neither liquid nor solid – can be added to the water.
In this light, the verb can collocate only with (o)-yu ‘hot water’ but not mizu
‘cold water’ as its direct object;3 so the cooking process referred to by wakasu
has quite narrow applications. Furthermore, wakasu is different from niru1 and
musu in its lexical semantic nature. The restricted choice of (o-)yu ‘hot water’ for
wakasu refers to a product resulting from the boiling process. In contrast, direct
objects for niru1 and musu are nouns that undergo cooking primarily for mak-
ing the ingredients tender.4 Using the terminology for verb classification that is
common in the lexical semantics literature (e.g. Levin 1993), wakasu is a verb of
creation while niru1 and musu are verbs denoting change of state. Members of
the creation type outside of the cooking field include horu ‘dig’ as in ana-o horu
[hole-Accusative dig] ‘to dig a hole’ and amu ‘knit’ as in seetaa-o amu [sweater-
Accusative knit] ‘knit a sweater’; other verbs belonging to change of state verbs
are mageru ‘bend’ as in harigane-o mageru [wire-Accusative bend] ‘bend a wire’
and kowasu ‘break’ as in tokei-o kawasu [watch-Accusative break] ‘break a watch’,
among many more. Thus, semantic dissections of meaning components and con-
sequential restrictions on grammatical collocation can lead to another coherent
classification of verbs across semantic fields.
Interestingly, the water-boiling process pertinent to cooking is extended to
preparing a bath, as in (o-)huro-o wakasu [bath tub-Accusative boil] ‘prepare a
bath’. Here, the collocated object (o-)huro ‘bath tub, bath room’ is considered
3. Occasionally, especially in informal sites on social media, gyuunyuu ‘milk’ and less fre-
quently mugicha ‘barley tea’ appear as direct objects of wakasu, as in gyuunyuu-o wakasu [milk-
Accusative boil] and mugicha-o wakasu [barley tea-Accusative boil]. At least in the case of
gyuunyuu as the direct object, however, the meaning of the verb is more in line with ‘to warm’
rather than getting the milk to the boiling point. When the object is (o-)yu ‘hot water’, the verb
cannot mean ‘to warm’.
4. Typical choices of niru1 include beans, fish, meat, and vegetables; and fish and vegetables
are frequent ingredients for musu. The direct objects that correspond to these ingredients for
niru1 and musu refer to their fresh – rather than cooked – states. An additional purpose for
steaming under the use of the verb musu ‘steam’ is to warm something that has already been
cooked.
a metonym in that a bath tub contains hot water for the purpose of bathing.
Although a bath tub is generally filled by running hot water from the faucet in
modern days, historically people filled the tub with cold water first and then
heated it to a comfortable temperature by direct fire or gas. The metaphorical
extension mirrors such a historical cultural trace. Note further that the classifi-
cation of wakasu as a creation verb is sustained in the metaphorical extension as
well. The direct object (o-)huro under the metonymic interpretation that refers to
hot water in a tub for bathing follows the parallel choice of direct object. That is,
the collocational restriction that the direct object denotes a product of the heat-
ing/boiling process is carried over to the extended meaning of the verb.
The componential analyses of wakasu, niru1 and musu are summarized in (5).
(5) wakasu: [+water] [+vigorous cooking] [collocate with (o-)yu]
niru1: [+non-fat liquid] [+submerged]
musu: [+water] [+vigorous cooking] [−submerged]
The feature [+non-fat liquid] for niru1 subsumes the use of water, as will be
explained in the description of niru2 below. These three verbs hold a semantic
relationship of incompatibility among one another: for instance, wakasu does not
imply niru1 or musu; nor does niru1 imply musu or wakasu.
Moving to the second and third rows of Table 4, yuderu ‘boil’, yugaku ‘parboil’,
and niru2 ‘boil in special broth’ are hyponyms of niru1 ‘boil’, while taku
‘boil+steam (rice)’ carries characteristics of niru1 and musu ‘steam’. I set up niru2
in order to reflect a slightly narrower nuance of niru1. Both cases of niru, i.e.
niru1 and niru2, involve cooking solid ingredients in a liquid by submersing them,
but niru2 calls for boiling in a special cooking liquid that is not simply water.
For instance, such broth may consist of water or dashi, soy sauce, sugar, and
mirin – typical ingredients for Japanese-style dishes. The underlying purposes of
the cooking process for niru1 and niru2 seem to be somewhat different as well.
The purpose of niru1 is primarily to make the ingredients tender, while the boiling
involved in niru2 is meant to make the ingredients tender and at the same time to
get them to absorb the cooking liquid in order to add flavor and taste. Due to at
least these two differences, niru2 is a type of niru1, where the cooking process of
niru2 is characterized by more strictly defined ingredients and purposes.
Yuderu ‘boil’ and yugaku ‘parboil’ describe similar cooking methods. In both,
ingredients are submerged in hot water. A distinctive difference between the two
is their cooking time and the underlying culinary reason. Yugaku requires a brief
moment of submersion while the cooking time for yuderu can vary depending
on the ingredients. This contrast seems to stem from the purpose of each cook-
ing process. The purpose of yugaku is primarily to remove strong – and often bit-
ter – tastes that are common among leafy vegetables like spinach. The verb yuderu
has more general purposes of making raw vegetables tender or getting the heat
through other ingredients including meat, sea food, and eggs for varying rea-
sons. Recall that Lehrer’s original analysis in Table 3 includes the feature [+spe-
cial food (eggs)], limiting the purpose of yuderu to boiling eggs, but the cooking
process which this verb denotes is much broader than that and extends to other
ingredients. The nuanced differences between the two cooking methods warrant
a hyponymous relationship between yuderu and yugaku.
An additional verb, hukasu, should be included as a hyponym of musu ‘steam’
to complete the Japanese classification of cooking verbs specified with [+water].
As far as the technical procedures are concerned, hukasu is virtually identical with
musu in their semantic characterizations. Hukasu, however, is used specifically
for potatoes and pumpkins, and may denote more forcefully than musu that its
purpose is to make these vegetables tender. That is, hukasu shares all the rele-
vant semantic components with musu but calls for an additional special feature
for narrowly selected ingredients: [+special food (potatoes, pumpkins)].
Finally, as the temporary gloss indicates, taku ‘boil+steam (rice)’ in the stan-
dard dialect is generally reserved for cooking rice, the Japanese staple food.
Lehrer’s characterization of taku consisting of the two processes of niru1 ‘boiling
in water’ and musu ‘steaming’, in that order, is basically accurate. I follow her char-
acterization for now although I will elaborate on the meaning of taku in relation
to the nature of musu ‘steam’. Since cooked white rice is one of the most essential
food items in the Japanese culinary culture, a unique verb reserved specifically for
it seems to have a solid motivation and a need from a cultural standpoint. Given
that the verb taku has such a specific purpose, it is straightforwardly understood
that taku is virtually always collocated with gohan ‘(cooked) rice’ as its choice
of direct object, i.e., gohan-o taku [rice (cooked)-Accusative cook]. It should be
interesting to note from the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic points of view that
gohan refers to cooked rice while the grain form is called kome, and that the lat-
ter cannot be used with taku as in *kome-o taku [rice (grain)-Accusative cook]. It
should be remembered that wakasu in the first row of Table 4 is a creation verb
and as such a product resulting from the process, i.e., (o-)yu ‘hot water’, must be
its direct object. In a similar vein, taku used in the sequence of gohan-o taku to
describe the process of cooking rice to be served as a staple food for a meal is also
classified as a creation verb rather than a change of state verb.
It is worth noting that the verb taku exhibits dialectal variation. In the western
region of Japan, taku can be used as an alternative to niru2, especially for slow-
cooking. Under such a regional usage, imo-o taku [potatoes-Accusative cook] and
mame-o taku [beans-Accusative cook], for instance, are equivalents of imo-o niru
and mame-o niru in eastern parts of Japan. Like niru2, taku in the western use is
considered a change of state verb. In the eastern part of Japan and in general, on
the other hand, taku is almost exclusively used for cooking rice in water.
The componential analyses of the additional four verbs are summarized in
(6).
(6) yuderu: [+water] [+submerged]
yugaku: [+water] [+submerged] [−long time]
niru2: [+water] [+submerged] [+special cooking liquid]
hukasu: [+water] [+vigorous cooking] [−submerged] [+special food (potato,
pumpkin)]
taku: NIRU1 followed by MUSU [+special food (rice)]
The set of semantic components associated with each verb leads to the incompati-
bility relation among yuderu, niru2, taku, and hukasu. Also following from it is the
hyponymy relation between yuderu and yugaku on the one hand and musu and
hukasu on the other, as seen in Table 4.
We have thus far observed that the verb taku in its general use exhibits an
interesting range of linguistic properties, some of which seem to have close ties,
at least underlyingly, with culinary concepts pertinent to the Japanese culture. In
this connection, I would like to follow up on taku and related verbs, especially
with the intention of explaining why taku was analyzed as “niru followed by
musu” by Lehrer and has been glossed as “boil+steam (rice)” in the current work.
Commenting from my own personal experience, the menu item “steamed rice” at
Chinese and Japanese restaurants in the US sounds very peculiar to me because
cooked white rice as I know it is not “steamed” in the same sense that steamed veg-
etables and steamed fish are. As I have discussed above, for the cooking process
that results in steamed food items, the verb musu is used. Lehrer’s analysis of
dividing the rice cooking process into niru and musu is intuitively on the right
track in that the process ends with the stage that parallels what the English verb
steam refers to. However, what we have regarded as the “steaming” stage toward
the end of the process of rice cooking in the Japanese culinary culture actually
has been labelled by the more narrowly defined verb, murasu. At the end of the
process of boiling the grain form of rice in simple water, the rice absorbs all the
liquid. At this point, the heat is removed or turned off, but in the pot the combi-
nation of heat, steam, and moisture still remains. The rice continues to absorb this
residual mixture, ultimately resulting in a fluffy, moist, and chewy outcome. So,
murasu is a type of musu, but it does not stand as a verb that describes an inde-
pendent cooking process or method. Instead, murasu seems to be better described
as a special type of steaming that partakes in a larger context of cooking rice. For
this reason and for lack of a better classification, I tentatively place it within taku.
(7) taku: NIRU1 followed by MURASU [+special food (rice)]
The fine-grained account of murasu obviously suggests that the verb is very
important for the rice culture, but interestingly, it is also used to refer to an initial
step of making pour-over drip coffee. As soon as hot water is poured over ground
coffee beans, foam appears. The water pouring should stop at this point, and the
coffee grounds then need to absorb the first batch of hot water. This process of
water-absorption is described by the verb murasu. In both rice cooking and coffee
brewing, the process of murasu does not involve an independent application of
external heat, but instead relies on residual energy during the process. While rice
cooking and coffee brewing seem to have very different cultural orientations as
food items, it is interesting to observe that letting boiled rice sit and letting ground
coffee steep are parallelly conceptualized and are uniformly embodied by the verb
murasu.
Table 5. Revised reanalysis of Japanese verbs of cooking with liquid

wakasu niru1 ‘boil’ musu ‘steam’
‘boil water’
yuderu niru2 ‘boil in taku ‘boil murasu hukasu ‘steam
‘boil’ special broth’ +steam (rice)’ ‘let sit’ (potato, pumpkin)’
yugaku
‘parboil’
Table 5 summarizes the lexical organization of the nine cooking verbs based
on the semantic components and further elaborations of fine-drawn nuances.
The tentative placement of murasu in the revised lexical taxonomy is intended to
reflect at least its partial hyponymic relation to musu in that the ingredient (i.e.,
almost-cooked rice) is not submerged in the water and yet the presence of steam is
necessary for the cooking process to be completed. Comparison between the clas-
sification of Japanese cooking verbs in Table 5 and that of English counterparts
in Table 2 point to two non-identical lexical organizations that have resulted from
distinct ways in which semantic components are lexicalized. Furthermore, each
taxonomy reflects often unique modes that are motivated by conceptualizations
of culinary processes specifically localized to a given culture.
3. Cultural conceptualization and linguistic tools
Comparing Japanese and English lexical organizations of cooking verbs informs

us that the two languages share cooking expressions based on similar concepts
while exhibiting clear differences. As is clear from the discussion in Section 2,

many of the Japanese verbs are based on culinary concepts specific to the Japan-
ese culture, while others show overlapping characteristics with subtle differences.
In light of the fact that the Japanese cooking tradition is rooted in a long and
renowned history while its English counterpart is perhaps more modestly per-
ceived, we may expect to have more variety of verbs or expressions in Japanese
that refer to cooking processes than what we have observed. There are in fact
other ways than by these verbs that we can describe cooking preparation more
richly and precisely. As the afore-mentioned research on motion verbs has amply
shown, semantic components can not only be internally lexicalized but also be
expressed periphrastically, often by relying on linguistic mechanisms that are of
wide use in the language.
In order to see the range of linguistic tools available in Japanese that enable
finer and more elaborate descriptions of cooking processes, let us contrast the
English classification of cooking verbs in Table 2 and the Japanese verbs in
Table 5. First, as I have demonstrated, parboil and steam correspond to yugaku
and musu, respectively, in that each pair shares at least very similar sets of seman-
tic features. Thus, they are virtually translation equivalents, straightforwardly
finding semantically corresponding lexical items in independent verbs. Second,
the English verbs, stew, reduce, and braise do not have corresponding expressions
by independent verbs in Japanese, and yet the concepts underlying these verbs
do in fact exist in Japanese cooking. Instead of representing the concepts by indi-
vidual verbs, at least two linguistic tools are accessible and commonly used in the
language: periphrastic phrases and compounds with the verb niru. Some exam-
ples illustrating these two methods are given in (8).
(8) stew:
a. torobi-de niru
low heat-with boil
b. ni-komu
boil-pack
(9) reduce: ni-tsumeru
boil-pack
(10) braise: mushi-ni-ni suru

steam-boil-to do
(8a) and (9) present two different types of periphrastic expressions. In (8a) the
verb that widely appears in more neutral contexts, niru ‘boil’, is modified by an
adverbial phrase that means “in low heat”, alluding to the slow cooking process
of stewing. Another periphrastic phrase is formed with the semantically null verb
suru ‘do’, in (10) along with a compound mushi-ni [steam-boil]. Interestingly,

Lehrer analyzes braise as a hyponym of stew in English, but the cooking process
has been viewed more in line with steaming in Japanese, as the inclusion of
musu – realized as its verbal stem, mushi – in the compound suggests. Com-
pounding is also exemplified by (8b) and (9), both of which include niru (surfaced
by the verbal root, ni) as their composite member. Even though there are no free-
standing verbs available in Japanese to describe the same cooking methods, these
compound words frequently appear in cooking instructions.
Third, the slow and gentle cooking in low heat that simmer describes is
even more accurately expressed by the use of mimetics (e.g. ideophones, ono-
matopoeia) like gutsugutsu, torotoro, and kotokoto. The mimetic vocabulary
appeals to our senses, and is often said to have more descriptive power than the
non-mimetic vocabulary.5 For example, gutsugutsu and kotokoto refer to small,
bubbly sounds made during slow cooking; and torotoro evokes an image of food
in a pot becoming tender, thick, and hearty. It is not surprising that Japanese
recipes are filled with these mimetic expressions (Tsujimura 2018a, 2023), and the
reader of the recipe can understand the instructions with mimetics better than
those given with an exact temperature in number, for example. Finally, poaching
is a concept that is missing at least in traditional Japanese cooking. In such a case,
an English loanword supplemented by the semantically empty verb suru is used,
forming poochi-suru [poach-do].
The comparison between the two languages suggests that when cooking con-
cepts exist in the Japanese culture but the language lacks individual verbs to cor-
respond to English counterparts, Japanese accommodates the apparent gaps by
other linguistic tools. As we will discuss in detail below, the most commonly used
mechanisms are compounding and the use of mimetic words. These Japanese-
specific linguistic tools are able to give even more detailed and vivid descriptions
than their English counterparts. I will demonstrate additional instances of more
wide-spread use of mimetics and compounding in cooking expressions. Japanese
mimetics form a vocabulary class with an extensive membership, and they play an
important role in elaborating on cooking processes. As briefly demonstrated pre-
viously, the general cooking verb niru ‘boil’ can be further detailed by an exten-
sive array of mimetics, such as gutsugutsu, kotokoto, satto, gotogoto, and guragura,
among many more. The wide range is illustrated in (11).
5. There is a rich set of literature on Japanese mimetics. See Hamano (1998), Akita (2009),
Akita and Tsujimura (2016) and references cited there.
(11) gutsugutsu niru ‘to boil, to bubble’

kotokoto niru ‘to simmer’
satto niru ‘to boil quickly’
gotogoto niru ‘to boil, to bubble’
guragura niru ‘to boil rigorously’
In these samples and many more like them, the absence of individual, free-
standing lexical items to correspond to the specific manner and state of cooking
in no way hinders descriptions or recognitions of these cooking modes. Mimetics
appeal to all five senses, by sound, appearance, feel (for texture and temperature),
taste, and smell; and there is a rich inventory of mimetics belonging to individual
and collective senses. As such, they provide more direct ways of portraying and
perceiving how a given food item is, and expected to be, cooked.
Compounding broadly participates in word formation in Japanese, and it
makes a crucial contribution to detailing the cooking process as well. The list in
(12) shows various V(erb)-V(erb) compounds where the first member is consis-
tently the root of the general verb niru.
(12) ni‑komu ‘to boil well, to stew’
ni‑tateru ‘to boil up’
ni‑tsumeru ‘to boil down’
ni‑kaesu ‘to reboil’
ni‑kobosu ‘to boil and then throw away the liquid (usually followed
by another round of boiling)’
ni‑shimeru ‘to boil x hard (down)’
ni‑dasu ‘to extract the essence by boiling’
ni‑tsukeru ‘to boil x hard with soy (and sugar)’
The compound verbs in (12) are frequently used in cookbooks and cooking
instructions in general. The second member of these compounds provides infor-
mation regarding the more detailed manner in which the general boiling process
should be achieved. Compounding, thus, is a productive tool to diversify what
is understood to be basic methods of cooking without the need to develop new
vocabulary that accommodates culinary concepts which are traditionally absent
in the Japanese culture. While a quick comparative glance at Tables 2 and 5 may
give the impression that Japanese cooking verbs are outnumbered by their Eng-
lish counterparts, the mimetic vocabulary and compounding readily afford lin-
guistic mechanisms to enrich the range of expressions needed to match culinary
concepts.
It should be underscored that the use of mimetics and compounding in cook-

ing expressions is not arbitrary or accidental. As has been noted by many in the
literature, similar patterns are adopted in motion verbs. Consider the modifica-
tion pattern in (13), taken from Hamano (1998: 2). A variety of manners of motion
can be expressed by different mimetic words, which modify a general verb of
walking, aruku ‘walk’. In a similar vein, mimetics accompanied by the semanti-
cally empty verb suru ‘do’ accurately describe the precise nature of various kinds
of pain in (14), which is based on Chang (1990: 85–88).
(13) dosadosa aruku ‘with a loud noise’
daradara aruku ‘slowly without enthusiasm’
zorozoro aruku ‘in great number’
dokadoka aruku ‘noisily and violently’
sassato aruku ‘speedily’
(14) chikuchiku suru ‘an intermittent pain akin to being stuck by thorns and
needles’
gangan suru ‘one’s head throbbing or feeling as if it is being
continuously struck’
hirihiri suru ‘to smart; a lingering feeling of pain/irritation on the skin’
piripiri suru ‘a pricking pain’
kirikiri suru ‘a splitting pain’
zukizuki suru ‘to rankle; a throbbing pain with a pulsing sensation’
Detailing the manner of walking in (13) as well as the type and degree of pain in
(14) supplied by a wide gamut of mimetic words is completely comparable to the
range of mimetics in (11), which inform us of the precise manner of cooking that
supplements the general cooking process denoted by niru.
Likewise, compounding provides a parallel situation in motion events, as
Matsumoto (1996) extensively discusses. Some examples are given in (15).
(15) a. kake-agaru [run-go up]
hai-agaru [crawl-go up]
uki-agaru [float-go up]
hane-agaru [jump-go up]
tobi-agaru [fly/jump-go up]
b. kake-mawaru [run-go around]
aruki-mawaru [walk-go around]
hashiri-mawaru [run-go around]
kogi-mawaru [paddle-go around]
koroge-mawaru [roll-go around]

tobi-mawaru [fly/jump-go around]
haizuri-mawaru [crawl-go around]
hane-mawaru [jump-go around]
c. tobi-aruku [fly/jump-walk]
hai-aruku [crawl-walk]
ukare-aruku [be merry-walk]
nagare-aruku [flow-walk]
Motion verbs like agaru ‘go up’ in (15a), mawaru ‘go around’ in (15b), and aruku
‘walk’ in (15c), which serve as the second member of the compounds, can receive
finer-grained descriptions from the first member that complements the basic
meaning of the motion verbs. The member in each compound describes a specific
manner such as running, crawling, floating, and jumping, among others. Here
again, compounding is a common strategy to add supplementary information to a
basic motion event type, just as compounding fine-tunes the descriptions of cook-
ing process, as shown in (12). Thus, in order to supply detailed circumstances, we
make good use of linguistic mechanisms that are available for manner expressions
across semantics fields in the language.
4. Conclusion
In this chapter I have analyzed a selected class of cooking verbs in Japanese, both
internally to Japanese and comparatively with English. Taking into consideration
culturally grounded concepts, the vocabulary has been componentially dissected,
so that the analysis has led to a coherent lexical organization that reflects seman-
tic features of individual lexical items as well as semantic relationships among
them. There is no denying that variability in cultural conceptualization shows a
strong connection to unique ways of lexicalizing cooking terms. For instance, we
have discussed that wakasu ‘boil water’ is highly restricted in its underlying cul-
tural concept, and the strict collocational restriction on its direct object could
be considered one of linguistic repercussions. Another example that showcases
strong cultural grounding is in our discussion of the verb murasu ‘let sit’ viewed
in continuation of the process denoted by taku ‘boil+steam (rice)’ as well as the
narrow interpretation of hukasu under its larger rubric of musu ‘steam’. Clearly,
lexicalization of these verbs cannot be explained without invoking culture-specific
conceptual paths leading to their linguistic manifestations. However, it should be
underscored that the cultural specificity and the regularity in lexical organization
are not mutually exclusive. By componentially analyzing the vocabulary of the
cooking field and by examining lexicalization patterns across semantic fields, we

are reminded that the lexicon is uniformly organized in terms of a set of underly-
ing concepts – culture-specific or otherwise – and the semantic components that
represent them.
I have also discussed several patterns of lexicalization in the Japanese vis-à-
vis the English taxonomy, and examined various linguistic ways of negotiating the
differences. To this end, I have isolated two situations: one in which a given con-
cept is missing in the Japanese culture, and the other in which a given concept is at
least partially shared. In the former situation, loanword and periphrastic expres-
sions are primary sources of linguistic negotiation. In the latter, we have observed
that Japanese makes an effective use of mimetics and compounding, both of
which are considered notably prevalent mechanisms in the language beyond the
cooking vocabulary. Besides the direct lexicalization of cooking processes in the
form of individual verbs, these linguistic mechanisms common in the language
help maintain the broad range of fine-grained descriptions pertinent to cooking
processes, while simultaneously preserving a culturally constructed conceptual-
ization of food preparation.
References
Akita, Kimi (2009). A Grammar of Sound-Symbolic Words in Japanese: Theoretical

Approaches to Iconic and Lexical Properties of Mimetics. Unpublished PhD thesis, Kobe
University.
Akita, Kimi & Natsuko Tsujimura (2016). Mimetics. In: Taro Kageyama & Hideki Kishimoto
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Wellness
A cultural linguistic analysis
of the conceptualisation of health
Penelope Scott
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
This chapter presents a Cultural Linguistic analysis of the conceptualisation

of wellness as found in contemporary internet language. It considers how
cultural conceptualisations found in the discourses of health, wellness and
detoxification intersect with other conceptualisations including for example
the notions of sacredness and purity associated with religion (Douglas
1966). wellness is structured by three broad cultural models: the ‘detox’
model, which incorporates aspects of Beck’s (1992) notion of ‘Risk Society’,
a ‘medical countercultural’ model, and a ‘whole health’ model. This chapter
also considers how knowledge of the cultural conceptualisations for
wellness affects responses to medical advice from different sources. The
analysis takes account of the cultural schemas (Quinn 1987; Sharifian 2011),
image schemas (Johnson 1987) and conceptual metaphors (Lakoff &
Johnson 1980) underpinning this view of health and demonstrates the value
of Cultural Linguistic approaches in Medical and Health Humanities.
Keywords: conceptualisation of health and wellness, Clean Eating,

wellness and science, wellness and pseudo-science
1. Introduction
Concepts relating to health are culturally constructed, dynamic, and flexible, and
are dependent on a number of cultural conceptualisations (see Sharifian 2011 and
Palmer 1996). From the later part of the 20th Century until the present day there
has been a shift towards a ‘holistic’ or ‘wellness-based’ approach to health, which
can be seen in collocations including ‘holistic health’, and ‘mind, body and spirit’.1
1. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (US Sub-corpus) (Davies 2013) the relative fre-
quencies (per million) of these collocations are as follows: ‘holistic health’ (Rel. freq. 87), and
‘mind, body and spirit’ (Rel. freq. 83).
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.06sco
Wellness 147
Spoel et al. (2012a) identify several conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson
1980) underpinning discourse on healthy eating, including food as fuel, food
as junk, and healthy eating as balanced eating. In another study (2012b),
they examine the moral language of guilt and pollution that pervades discourse
on healthy eating in Canadian and UK participants. So far, however, there has
been relatively little attention given to ‘wellness’, ‘clean eating’, and the discourse
around ‘detoxing’ from linguistic perspectives. While some of the recommenda-
tions found within texts promoting this approach to health are congruent with
those of public health campaigns, many are not promoted by such institutions,
and have attracted criticism from medical professionals in the media and in acad-
emia (e.g., Rousseau 2015).2 A disjuncture in terms of conceptualisation there-
fore exists between some expert and lay communities in terms of wellness and
health and a detailed analysis of wellness concepts may therefore be beneficial
towards the promotion of understanding and communication of health messag-
ing.
This chapter examines the conceptualisation of health as found in discourse
focussed on wellness, clean eating, and detoxification in contemporary English.
The analysis considers whether wellness constitutes a development of 20th Cen-
tury models of health, represents a return to a historical and more ‘general’
model, represents a secular religion, or a response to ‘risk society’. I argue that
wellness appears to share certain cultural schemas in common with some reli-
gious discourse, and also shows evidence of a model of ‘risk’. While a concept of
health emphasising the ‘whole’ person, including spirit, is apparent, this con-
ceptualisation is strikingly different from the notion of health seen in the earliest
period of English, which is discussed in Section 2. The analysis is framed within
Cultural Linguistics, and presents a set of cultural conceptualisations including
cultural schemas, categories and metaphors in terms of Sharifian’s ‘Distributed
Model’ (2011). Such a granular analysis is successful in modelling this cultural
worldview, and demonstrates that cultural models may share component parts of
other cultural models.
The study begins by examining in detail a selection of podcasts on the subject
of wellness and detox from The goop Podcast, which was set up in 2018 as a plat-
form for members of the goop brand to discuss a range of wellness-related topics
with guests. In order to gain an insight into predominantly lay perspectives, the
chapter also examines the posts and replies of three sub-Reddits: Clean Eating,
Detox, and Wellness.
2. For some media discussions of Clean Eating see, e.g., Tandoh (2017), Hardman &
Prendergast (2015) and BBC’s Horizon: Clean Eating – The Dirty Truth.
148 Penelope Scott
2. Methodology and overview of the data sources
This study makes use of two distinct data sources: wellness-themed podcasts from
goop, and Reddit wellness-themed communities. These sources have been cho-
sen since they each provide different analytical possibilities and provide distinct
insights into the conceptualisation of health and wellness in contemporary
(predominantly) US cultures. The Reddit and Podcast sources can be selected
by theme, meaning that it is possible to examine the discourse of a health and
clean eating focussed community. The podcasts have the additional benefit of an
enhanced platform for narrative, giving some insight into people’s personal expe-
riences and reasons for pursuing a particular health lifestyle.
The Clean Eating, Detox and Wellness communities on Reddit have been
collected to create a small corpus of approximately 33,000 words composed of
original posts and replies, reflecting conceptualisations of wellness from (often)
non-specialist contributors.3 A selection of podcasts has been examined from The
goop Podcast. The goop brand was started by Gwyneth Paltrow as a newsletter in
2008 and is concerned with wellness, demonstrating a particular conceptualisa-
tion of health; the website (https://goop.com/whats-goop/) states that “[…] good
food is the foundation of love and wellness, that the mind/body/spirit is inex-
tricably linked, and we have more control over how we express our health than
we currently understand”. The episodes collected are those explicitly focussed on
either clean eating, detox, or food and health, including Detox without deprivation
(33 mins, 22/01/2019, with guest speaker Deanna Minich), Gwyneth on detoxes,
cleanses, and how she eats (37 mins, 8/01/2019), Is intermittent fasting the key to
health? (44 mins, 15/01/2019, with guest speaker Valter Longo), Is detoxing real?
(38 mins, 07/06/2018, with guest speaker Alejandro Junger), How to avoid the
chemicals that disrupt hormones (41 mins, 29/1/2019, with guest speaker Jessice
Helm), and Could changing your diet heal autoimmune disease? (38 mins, 12/04/
2018, with guest speaker Steven Gundry).4
3. Historical and emerging concepts of health and wellness
The notion of a new form of health in which the wellbeing of the whole self is pro-
moted has evolved in the Anglo-American linguistic community within the last
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/CleanEating, https://www.reddit.com/r/Detox, https://www

.reddit.com/r/Wellness. Posts and replies were taken up to June 2019 and have been
anonymised. Spelling and formatting has been retained.
4. The quotations provided have been transcribed by the author.
Wellness 149
century. According to Dolfman (1973: 492), historically “the story of the use of the
word health carries the idea from a generalised beginning to a generalised end”.
By this he asserts that in the earliest period of English ‘health’ had the generalised
meaning of being “sound or whole”. While it is true that, etymologically, ‘health’
has its origins in the notion of wholeness and covers spiritual and physical health
alike, there is evidence for a degree of polysemy as opposed to vagueness within the
earliest period of English. It was derived from the Old English adjective hal ‘whole/
healthy’ via the same noun-forming -th suffix that gives us ‘length’ and ‘width’. The
adjective hal, the Present-Day English reflex of which is ‘whole’ and from which
halig ‘holy’ was derived was also highly polysemous, primarily having a mean-
ing in Old English relating to health while also referring to physical wholeness
and spiritual salubrity. In Old English, hælð, and hælu / hæle – another form
derived from hal – could refer to one’s physical and mental health, and could be
‘given’, or ‘stolen’ in the sense of a healing miracle transferred through touch:
(1) Heo creap ða betwux ðam mannum bæftan þam hælende. and forstæl hire hælu
(ÆCHom II, 28: 228.236)5
[She crept then between the men behind the saint, and stole her healing]
In the following example, health is conceptualised as an object that one may or

may not possess, alongside nourishment and garments:
(2) Mislice angsumnyssa he forbær þa ða he næfde ne bigleofan ne hælðe ne
hætera (ÆCHom I, 23 B1.1.25)
[Various bodily distresses he forbore when he had no nourishment nor health
nor garments]
In a small minority of occurrences (x3 in the Old English Herbarium) health

appears to be a destination, with one being ‘led to health’:
(3) Hrædlice hyt hi afeormeð & to hæle gelædeð (Lch I (Herb), 20.3)
[Quickly it cleanses them and leads them to health]
Certainly, some aspects of the conceptualisation of health are highly basic,

demonstrating a degree of consistency diachronically and cross-linguistically.
Notably, each of these examples conceptualises health (a state) in terms of an
object or space, which is consistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) ‘Event
Structure Metaphor’, in which various kinds of states are conceptualised in terms
of physical aspects including space, force, and movement, and which is basic in
5. All examples from Old English are taken from the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus
(Healey et al. 2009), and are labelled following the textual abbreviations found in the corpus.
For example, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, First Series is presented as ÆCHom I.
150 Penelope Scott
nature and is argued to be universal. In Present-Day English we can similarly say

‘nursed to health’, or ‘you have your health’, though the range of the Present-Day
English term does not usually extend to an object whose ownership can be trans-
ferred.
Another aspect of the semasiological range of hælð is its use in domains out-
side of the somatic, serving as a target domain for spiritual health. The wide
range of its meaning reveals sense extension by means of systematic processes.
For example, spiritual health was modelled in the period on somatic health,
as demonstrated by the use of an overt metaphor that constructs spiritual health
in terms of physical health, in needs of its own kind of ‘healing’ (see Example 4
below). It is important to be careful not to assume that a cross-domain division
exists in a historical culture that may not have had one; as Lockett (2011: 10)
observes, there has been a tendency to impose aspects of the modern Western
worldview such as the dualism of mind and body upon other cultures, including
historical ones. Nevertheless, while mind/body dualism is a product of later cen-
turies, body/spirit dualism appears to be part of the Old English conceptual
landscape and I would argue that the evidence suggests that hal ‘healthy’ is pol-
ysemous in Old English, being structured in part by conceptualisations includ-
ing spiritual salvation as physical health. This idea comes through in overt
metaphors in religious texts, including for example in the Old English translation
of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies:
(4) Se ðe wenð þæt he hal sy. se is unhal; Þæt is. se ðe truwað on his agenre
rihtwisnysse. ne hogað he be ðam heofenlican læcedome (ÆCHom II: 274.52)
[He who fancies that he is healthy [whole], he is unwhole, that is, he who relies
on his own righteousness does not consider the heavenly healing]
(5) Ac se gooda læce, þæt is God, lacnað hiora mod (Bo: 39.134.16)
[But the good leech, that is God, heals their spirit]
As the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) states, the primary sense of læce was a
healer, figuratively applied to God and Christ (OED s.v. leech).6 Similarly, læce-
dom ‘cure’ refers to physical and spiritual cures. In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
in the Old English version, he states that a “Micel wund behofað micles læce-
6. Though the OED assumes the use of læce to refer to God to be figurative, it is worth noting
here that while it may be figurative to refer to God as a healer of sin, the quotation below from
Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies makes clear that God can also literally be seen as the healer of bodies.
I therefore consider god is a healer to be a cultural schema rather than a metaphor. Regarding
the domain split between somatic and spiritual, it is also important to note that cases in which
a spiritual malady is seen to cause physical symptoms would not be metaphorical. I am grateful
to an anonymous reviewer for raising this.
Wellness 151
domes” [great wound requires a great cure] (26.350.19), in which the great ‘wound’
is caused by sin, and the ‘cure’ or treatment is penance including severe fasting.
We see another case of a play on words from Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies in this
statement, which explicates the literal meaning of hælend ‘savior/healer’, which is
usually reserved as an epithet for Christ: “He is hælend gehaten. for ðan ðe he
hælð ægðer ge manna lichaman ge heora sawle” [He is called healer, because he
heals both the bodies of men and their souls] (ÆCHom II 37, 273.44). In the Old
English period, we see the sense of health radiating from a somatic sense to a spir-
itual one, structured by a set of conceptualisations in which the spiritual target
domain is structured by the physical source domain of health, including sin as
illness, spiritual cures as physical cures, and spiritual health as phys-
ical health, and the cultural schema god is a healer. As we will see in later
sections, elements of the spiritual nature of health do indeed later emerge in the
20th century particularly in the case of wellness, but it is of a different kind to
that reflected in the earliest period of English.
Dolfman (1973) claims that there was a later restriction in the meaning, and
that “[t]he notion that health is a disease-free state or condition was extremely
popular during the first half of the 20th century, and was recognised by many
as the definition of health” (Dolfman 1973: 493, emphasis original). In the later
half of the 20th century, however, the term begins to generalise again and can
be represented by numerous ‘models’ of health. The World Health Organization
(WHO), for example, in 1947 defines health not merely as the absence of illness
but as “a state of complete physical and mental wellbeing”. Another conceptu-
alisation emerging in the 20th century that Dolfman discusses is the ‘wellness’
model, promoted by Halbert Dunn in 1959. Dunn (1959: 447) defines ‘high-level
wellness’ as “an integrated method of functioning which is oriented toward max-
imising the potential of which the individual is capable, within the environment
where he is functioning”. He sees it as “dynamic – a condition of change in which
the individual moves forward, climbing toward a higher potential of functioning”
(Dunn 1959: 447). wellness, then, is conceptualised metaphorically in terms of
an upwards ascent and a journey, while health, for Dunn, is merely a static
and passive notion. At the time of his writing, wellness was not a widespread
concept, at least not to the extent of being lexicalised; writing over a decade later
Dolfman (1973: 496) contends that “the word ‘wellness’ does not exist in the Eng-
lish language”, claiming that the addition of a new term does little to help in
the definition of ‘health’. Today, however, the word wellness appears in the OED
within Frequency Band 4, and appears in the Corpus of Global Web-Based Eng-
lish (Davies 2013) with a relative frequency (per million words) of 5.11 in the US,
with the highest relative frequency among the countries represented in the cor-
pus being 10.53 in Canada with 10.53, and the lowest being 1.57 in the GB corpus.
152 Penelope Scott
Another way that ‘wellness’ differs from the WHO definition of ‘health’, or the ear-
lier ‘disease free’ state, is in the addition of ‘spiritual’ health to somatic and men-
tal health; Dunn (1959: 448) asserts that “[m]any of us, as physicians and health
workers, have become increasingly dissatisfied with our disciplines which cus-
tomarily deal only with the body or mind of man, leaving to religion, metaphysics,
and philosophy the affairs of the spirit”. Thus, the concept of ‘health’ comes to
encompass a wide range of aspects of wellbeing, though the wellness model
reflects some major differences from historical health models, despite having
breadth of scope in common.
Dunn’s (1959) characterisation of wellness as a journey, which is a more
specific metaphor subordinate to the well-attested life is a journey7 metaphor
described by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is evident in the goop podcasts and in the
Reddit communities:
(6) So as I was moving through my journey realising that science wasn’t the be all
end all I started exploring different things like reiki, energy medicine and chi-
ropractic naturopathy. (The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(7) So glad I have started this journey to wellness. (Clean Eating Reddit)
(8) First off, congrats on your journey. (Clean Eating Reddit)
(9) I feel like once I venture into the inner isles I get sucked into the processed
foods which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. Good luck with your journey.
(Clean Eating Reddit)
(10) Hello – I started this journey with clean eating to try and reverse my multiple
food intolerances and health issues. (Clean Eating Reddit)
This notion, which is represented well in both the goop podcasts and the Reddit
communities, is compatible with Dunn’s (1959) notion of ‘high level wellness’ as
dynamic; while health or wellness may be a destination on ‘life’s journey’, as in
Example (7), wellness may also be the journey as opposed to being a destination,
as in (6).
4. Mind, body, and spirit
The health of the spirit in the culture of wellness is at times preserved through
nurturance and at times by spiritual asceticism, which itself is a cultural model
7. Following Sharifian (2011), metaphors are phrased using ‘as’. However, where an earlier
described metaphor is referred to the original phrasing has been retained.
Wellness 153
typically associated with religion. Logan (2017: 601) states that “goop, perhaps,
more than the other lean consumer practices within ‘the gospel of minimalism,’
embraces the spiritual dimensions of depletion”. As a brand that is at the interface
between religion and capitalism and is characterised by the limited and exclusive
nature of their products, Logan (2017: 604) argues that “goop is premised on the
idea that its lifestyle is available not to the masses, but to the few. It presumes lim-
ited atonement, a Christian, and specifically Calvinist category”. She clarifies that
it is not that goop is Calvinist because it is directly associated with Calvinism, but
“because it is a cultural carrier of Calvinism’s sociological tendency to enact a dis-
cipline of everyday life as evidence of election” (Logan 2017: 604). Of interest here
is the notion of a social movement or brand as a ‘cultural carrier’ of at least a par-
tial set of cultural conceptualisations associated with a different group. Whether it
is the kinds of foods that may be consumed, or the outright denigration of corpo-
ral satisfaction, the relationship between religion, spirituality and diet is close and
complex. Soler (1997) discusses the dietary prohibitions guided by Mosaic laws,
claiming that rules stating that only animals with a ‘hoofed foot’, ‘cloven hoof ’ and
that ‘chew the cud’ may be eaten relate to the status of the animals as herbivorous
or carnivorous, noting that “[c]arnivorous animals are unclean. If man were to eat
them he would be doubly unclean” (Soler 1997: 60). Such a system of categorisa-
tion in some cases prohibits consumption of animals that are herbivores, indicat-
ing the necessity for prescriptive systems of categorisation to be easily applicable
and generalisable, rather than going into granular detail. This is perhaps a feature
in common with modern day categorisations of foods into ‘clean’ or ‘toxic’. Soler
goes on to note that some herbivorous animals are also ruled out by these restric-
tions, including horses, which could be considered to be ‘blemished’ on account
of having a foot shape that ‘deviates’ from the model. Interestingly, such a notion
returns us to the etymology of the word ‘health’ in English, which through its
derivation hal+ig comes to mean ‘holy’, likely based on the idea of being perfect
and unblemished.
Within Christianity, fasting has been an important devotional practice,
though Bell (1985: 118) notes that “the ascetic impulse has its historical antecedents
less in Judeo-Christian beliefs than in ancient Greece and the East”. Gregorie de
Nysse warns that “spiritual food for the well-being of our souls” and “sensible
food to strengthen our bodies” is necessary (Gregorie de Nysse 1966: 71, cited in
Bell 1985: 120). A similarly moderate approach is taken by Ælfric of Eynsham, an
Anglo-Saxon abbot and hagiographer, who cautions against excessive asceticism
in The Prayer of Moses (ÆLS Prayer Moses: 96–105), saying:
(11) ac us secgað bec þæt sume fæston swa þæt hi geswencton hi sylfe forðearle,
and nane mede næfdon þæs mycclan geswinces, ac ðæs þe fyrr wæron Godes
154 Penelope Scott
miltsunge. Nu gesetton ða halgan fæderas þæt we fæston mid gerade, and ælce
dæg eton mid gedafenlicnysse swa þæt ure lichama alefed ne wurðe, ne eft ofer
fæt to idelum lustum
[but books say that some fasted such that they afflicted themselves greatly, and
no rewards had they for this great suffering, but from that were further from
God’s mercy. Now the holy fathers established that we fast with wisdom and
each day eat fittingly so that our bodies don’t become weak nor again over-fat
to idle lusts]
Ælfric suggests that such fasting did go on, for example beyond the period of
lent, or excessively to the point of eating only every other day. Furthermore,
this admonishment indicates that such ‘excessive’ fasting was voluntary and not
a requirement of the Church establishment. This is analogous to today’s harsh
‘detox’ programmes, which often go against the advice of instituted health organ-
isations. That is not to say that people of a different cultural context and time
period are restricting their diets for the same reasons, however, the possibility of
the detox model having inherited aspects of a religious cultural model is factored
into this analysis.
5. Wellness and pseudoscience
A notable feature of 'alternative' health and wellness, particularly when concerned

with diet, is celebrity endorsement, which is a central aspect of the goop brand.
Rousseau (2015) examines the celebrity-endorsed alternative ‘fad’ diet phenome-
non from the perspective of attention economics, which explains the persuasive
power of alternative diet regimens in terms of the “large (and growing) disparity
between the information that we have available to us, and the limited resources we
have to navigate that information – chiefly attention, but also time, and often the
intellectual skill set to question and understand much of what we are exposed to”
(Rousseau 2015: 268). Since a detailed understanding of all aspects and nuances
of human health is beyond the expertise of the general population, there is a
temptation to believe in ‘quick fixes’. She notes that many alternative health trends
are “supported by little or no scientific evidence (because if they were, they
would likely cease to be alternative)” (Rousseau 2015: 270). Naturopathic medi-
cine, detoxing and integrative medicine have been argued to promote pseudo-
science, which may be characterised by the use of anecdotes as opposed to data.
This extends even to the work of certain ‘maverick’ medical professionals who
promote certain ‘fad’ diets. As Rousseau states:
Wellness 155
Often in evidence here, as in most fad diets, is a rejection of nuance and complex-
ity in favor of one new certainty (the elimination of which is often key to the quick
fix promised by the diet), for example, the “toxicity” of gluten, sugar or carbohy-
drates in general, and the support of anecdotes rather than scientific data.
(Rousseau 2015: 267)
Many elements of wellness culture are derived from ‘naturopathy’, which has its
roots in a 19th Century German ‘natural living’ movement, in which conventional
medical knowledge such as germ theory and vaccination was rejected in favour
of notions of detoxification (Atwood 2003). Naturopathy is gaining in legal sta-
tus in the modern day, with five colleges (at the time of writing) in the US having
Naturopathic Doctorate programmes, which incorporate subjects typically found
in a Medical Doctorate such as pharmacology alongside therapies whose efficacy
has in some cases been discredited by medical science such as homeopathy.8 The
movement has been criticised for incorporating unproven medical therapies and
for discouraging practices such as regular scheduled vaccination (Hermes 2018;
Atwood 2003). Naturopathy is predicated on a number of principles, including
for example the “healing power of nature”, “doctor as teacher”, “treat the whole
person”, and “prevention” (Hermes 2018: 139). Many of these tenets are based on
complex belief systems, which are in part culturally specific. For example, ‘treat
the whole person’ points to a belief that other modes of treatment treat only ‘part’
of a person, and are therefore inferior. It also structures the concept of a person
in terms of a part-whole image schema (Johnson 1987), in which case the com-
posite parts are the mind, body and spirit, with a notion that what affects one
affects the others.9 Other aspects of naturopathy may result from universal cogni-
tive learning processes, including the assumption that if A precedes B, A causes
B. For example, a belief in the healing power of nature can lead one to assume
causality when a remedy is taken and and subsequent improvement in the con-
dition occurs, whether or not the remedy was responsible. What often amounts
to a belief in spite of systematic evidence has led to criticisms of ‘pseudoscience’
(Hermes 2018; Atwood 2003; Rousseau 2015 etc.). In recent years there has been
8. In light of this observation, there is an interesting question regarding whether its definition
as ‘scientific’ or ‘unscientific’ is contingent on its being included at certain types of institutions,
or on other measures such as the nature and quality of the evidence-based studies. This
is beyond the scope of this chapter, since the aim is to uncover conceptualisations around
health and wellness as evidenced by wellness discourse, rather than to evaluate the medical
approaches involved.
9. There is no universal necessity for the idea of the whole person to be divided this way, nor is
it a universal idea that the health of each aspect depends on the health of the others; in the Early
Medieval English mindset for example bodily health does not lead to other forms of health.
156 Penelope Scott
an increase in ‘functional’ and ‘integrated’ medicine, in which ‘alternative’ and

‘conventional’ medical practices are integrated. Many of the guest speakers on The
goop Podcast are proponents of such practices or are practitioners themselves.
Critics of Integrated Medicine claim that the ‘alternative’ practices are not science
or evidence-based and that their integration with science-based medicine has a
deleterious effect on health literacy. On the other hand, an approach to health in
which the ‘whole person’ is treated has potential benefits. Rather than assuming
health to be simply the ‘absence of illness’ (e.g. the ‘reductionist’ model proposed
by Boorse 1977), some scholars have argued in favour of a model in which over-
all happiness, wellbeing, and the ability to carry out the desired goals constitutes
health (Nordenfelt 1993).
Since Integrative Medicine draws on both conventional and non-
conventional approaches, with differing views on disease aetiology and treatment,
it is worth considering how potentially conflicting or competing schemas interact
conceptually. According to Lobato and Zimmerman (2018: 26–27), it is possible
for individuals to possess two competing schemas at once, which has been evi-
denced in reaction time tests by Shtulman and Valcarcel (2012) in which partici-
pants took longer in assessing the validity of statements that were mismatched in
terms of the ‘intuitive’ and ‘scientific’ truth values, suggesting ‘cognitive conflict’. It
is worth noting here that the notion of evidence is also a rich cultural conceptu-
alisation that has its roots in British Empiricism. According to Wierzbicka (2010),
the use of that particular term has developed in such a way diachronically as to
move from a sense of ‘proof ’ and ‘clear knowledge’ to ‘uncertainty’. Interestingly,
analysis of The goop Podcast reveals that the discourse of evidence is part of the
discourse around wellness, but that there is a different notion of what kind of evi-
dence is acceptable:
(12) People who drink five or more cups of coffee a day have almost no evidence of
Alzheimers or Parkinson’s.
(The goop Podcast – “Could changing your diet heal autoimmune disease?”)
(13) Like when you ask them like “don’t you think you don’t want plastic in your
body?” of course they don’t want plastic but I don’t know whether… it feels
like maybe there are ways we can we can position it or push it or create some
evid… some a mountain of evidence to sort of make it part of our lives.
(The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(14) And I think that that’s what you mentioned is really important to sort of… the
absence of evidence doesn’t mean the evidence of absence.
(The goop Podcast – “Is detoxing real?”)
Wellness 157
In Example (12), there is a claim but it is unsubstantiated. In (13) there is a top-

down approach to evidence, in which an intuitive argument is put forth with the
notion that evidence needs to be gathered in order to effect policy change. Exam-
ple (14) implicitly suggests that belief in spite of a lack of evidence is reasonable
since a lack of evidence does not prove a lack of existence. An empiricist notion
of evidence is part of this cultural worldview, but it differs from that of ‘scientific’
discourse in the way in which uncertainty is understood. In modern empirical
science a claim is only defensible if it is falsifiable in the sense put forth by Karl
Popper. In cognitive terms, what this results in is a kind of tentative belief, with
schema adjustment or replacement being necessary in the event of new evidence.
This final example brings us to another important aspect of the discourse around
wellness and clean eating, which is the representation of a perceived dichotomy
between the medical establishment, or ‘doctors’, and alternative medicine.
5.1 Doctors and science
Proponents of wellness appear to be generally accepting of the idea that there

is often a religious and/or pre-modern philosophical basis to certain alternative
remedies. However, they reject the notion of ineffectiveness on the basis that there
is a lack of evidence. In the podcasts we see the idea that there is evidence but that
it is either hidden or not seen due to bias on the part of the establishment:
(15) In fact, there’s evidence based on the National Academy of Sciences review
that there’s a lot of corruption in the Dietary Guidelines Committee.
(The goop Podcast – “What we got wrong about nutrition”)
(16) […] doctors see what they believe they don’t believe what they see … And I think
younger doctors are coming along that have open minds.
(17) Yeah, so I think there are, there are doctors that are open minded, and they’re
careful but open minded, And there are those that are just refusing to see any
changes. (The goop Podcast – “Is intermittent fasting the key to health?”)
(18) […] one of the amazing things I’ve learned… and surgeons don’t listen. It’s one
of the nice things about surgeons, I taught myself to listen, and I taught myself
to believe the female opposite me.
(The goop Podcast – “Could changing your diet heal autoimmune disease?”)
The idea of accepting evidence only according to the rules of replicability and sta-
tistical significance is seen as ‘closed minded’ and indicative of an inability to ‘see’,
or ‘listen’, while the notion of being able to hold several cultural schemas, which
may in some cases conflict, is a sign of being ‘open minded’ or able to ‘listen’. This
158 Penelope Scott
sees evaluation of evidence in terms of sensory abilities, which is perhaps more

intuitive than the scientific method.
A dichotomy between doctors and alternative practitioners is set up using
oppositional language pertaining to a battle metaphor:
(19) It’s interesting, I sat on a plane next to a guy and we just ended up talking and
he sort of volunteered that he had been diagnosed as diabetic and his doctor
tried to put him on insulin. And he said, “No”, like, he didn’t really know any-
thing about it but he was like, “I’m not doing it”. And he changed his diet dra-
matically, and doesn’t have diabetes, and… but it’s interesting, because his… he
had to fight his doctor dramatic – , like a major tug of war, and refusing meds.
(The goop Podcast – “Is intermittent fasting the key to health?”)
(20) We were fighting for clinical trials, we’re saying “let’s test it” you know? And but
now say the great majority of big hospitals and big universities are on our side,
and basically saying, “Let’s test it”.
(21) In this current medical climate, you have to be your own champion.
The use of such discourse points fosters a sense of inclusion between the speakers
and the listeners and presents a monolithic view of the medical establishment.
There is also evidence for the idea that science has failed to ‘keep up’, or criticisms
of science as internally inconsistent:
(22) […] many of the things that I’m interested in are not backed up by science yet.
(The goop Podcast – “Is detoxing real?”)
(23) Why is there so much conflicting information about diet and nutrition and
even science that seems in conflict.
(24) […] we have followed every single recommendation that the government has
given us, we’ve eaten less fat, we’ve eaten more carbohydrates, we’ve eaten less
meat, we’ve eaten less eggs, we’ve eaten less, mi…whole milk, we’ve eaten less
butter, and we’re sicker and fatter than ever. And so people are confused. And
when you look at how we come to conclusions, it’s often based on shaky sci-
ence. (The goop Podcast – “What we got wrong about nutrition”)
Example (24) signals inclusion by using the inclusive second person and thus
drawing an opposition between ‘us’ and the government. Drawing on the stan-
dard conceptual metaphor theories are buildings, established science is
depicted as ‘shaky’. The idea that food is integral to detoxification processes is also
related to a set of cultural schemas: (1) many diseases are caused by a buildup
Wellness 159
of toxins; (2) many foods are toxic; (3) some foods are ‘clean’ and help
to remove toxins.
(25) I really kind of wanted to bring a scientific perspective for those MDs who
really do believe that food is medicine.
(The goop Podcast – “Gwyneth on detoxes, cleanses, and how she eats”)
The notion of spirituality as being a necessary part of the ‘whole person’ is implicit
in the following statements, which also are suggestive of a notion in which ‘sci-
ence’ is seen as a ‘part’, as opposed to a whole. In this view, science is one method
amongst many, as opposed to being a more overarching schema structuring the
pursuit of knowledge.
(26) I started looking under the hood of science but then I realised that I could
only get so well with science.(The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(27) So I kind of feel like science and spirituality need to start talking to one
another. That art and medicine need to join hands because otherwise we’re
fragmented. (The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(28) […] medicine as healing we’re not robots you know.
(29) […] looking at people as like whole and complicated like not as robots.
Doctors and science are portrayed as being unable or unwilling to see, as being
‘closed minded’ and focussing only on a ‘part’ as opposed to the mind/body/spirit
‘whole’. This oppositional and ‘countercultural’ discourse is particularly strong in
the selected goop podcasts, possibly due to some of the guests being active pro-
ponents of alternative medicine. The Reddit communities did not provide evi-
dence for this conceptualisation of conventional medicine, indicating the diversity
of cultural conceptualisations among individuals with an interest in ‘wellness’.10
One model that was shared between goop and the Reddit communities relates to
‘detoxing’ and ‘cleansing’, which is the focus of the next section.
5.2 Detoxing, cleansing
Some of the more restrictive ‘clean eating’ patterns are referred to as ‘detoxes’ or
‘cleanses’, typically predicated on the idea of eliminating certain ‘toxins’ from the
diet, or facilitating the process by which they are eliminated from the body by the
inclusion of certain ingredients:
10. No tokens of the word ‘science’ or ‘doctor’ were oppositional within the selected Sub-
Reddits.
160 Penelope Scott
(30) What are some tips for detox beginners for someone who isn’t particularly
health conscious. I mean, again, I would say, cut out sugar dairy and gluten to
start with and processed foods, and just try to eat lots of vegetables, good qual-
ity proteins, and just start slow.
This example implies that detoxing is a skill, and the phrase ‘start slow’ is again
compatible with the wellness as a journey metaphor. The need for detoxing fol-
lows from the naturopathic view of a body that heals itself if and only if it is given
the right conditions:
(31) And there are a lot of Western doctors that think detox is bullshit and they
think that the body detoxifies itself and we don’t need to do anything to aid in
the detoxification process. And then, but there are the MDs who are looking at
nutrition in a different way.
In this case, the body requires help to detox, which comes in the form of dietary
changes. The self can be conceptualised also as an electronic device in need of a
‘reset’, which is a sub-metaphor of the body as machine metaphor: the self as a
computer.
(32) […] thats what a detox does it’s it’s a reset. It gets us to look within at kind of
our elemental selves. The earth the air the water the fire […].
In such a case, the detox is followed by the perception of increased productivity

and awareness, analogous to the effect of data clearing on a computer. This notion
of being aware and ‘awake’ to the body is also suggested in the following example:
(33) [detox is] a ritual that I …, I’m not going to say I look forward to it but when
it’s done I always feel like it was very worthwhile, I think one of my favourite
things about detox is I always feel super awake to my body.
Example (33) uses religious discourse in conceiving of the detox as a ritual and
draws on notions of enhanced awareness resulting through dietary simplicity.
There appears to be a relationship between wellness and religion on account of
the integration of the ‘spirit’ into concepts of health, along with the potential sim-
ilarities between strict ascetic detoxing and the spiritually cleansing fasts among
medieval saints. The suppression of the body within this religious tradition results,
for some individuals, in a sense of spiritual salubrity. However, the metaphors
relating to health and religion in Early English are not evidenced in the wellness
data; there is little evidence for sin as illness and spiritual cures as physical
Wellness 161
cures, and the metaphor spiritual health as physical health, needs to be

revised. These are no longer metaphorical, but instead reflect the cultural schemas
spiritual and mental health effects physical health and physical
health effects spiritual and mental health. Rather than the suppression of
physical desire leading to spiritual health, we see that the experience of ‘clean eat-
ing’ or ‘detoxing’ leads to ‘feeling amazing’ after a period of difficulty during the
initial stages, ‘feeling awake to the body’, or ‘appreciating food’:
(34) […] and I started feeling amazing by the end.
(35) […] and you get to appreciate food so much more afterwards I feel like.
(36) With that said I am now eating whole and clean along with supplements sug-
gested by Dr. I am feeling so much better. (Clean Eating Reddit)
(37) […] but I’ve learned how to avoid indulging every day and it has made food
taste SO much better all around. Love the clean eating meals and when I have
a cookie or something, I savor it and feel so complete and I don’t have to eat
10! (Clean Eating Reddit)
(38) It’s addictive once you start because not only do you see results quicker than
anything else ever, you FEEL BETTER. I can’t even stress what a different per-
son you will feel like when you get to running on a super clean diet.
Given that spiritual and mental health effects physical health, for some
members the process of asceticism leads to a feeling of physical health. On the
other hand, since physical health effects spiritual and mental health we
also see the reverse, where fasting seen as a scientifically necessary move towards
preserving physical health can have the dual purpose of healing the body as well
as promoting a feeling of spiritual wellbeing.
(39) When I was doing lots of nutrition protocols with people for detoxing what I
would see is that they would start to let go emotionally or mentally spiritually
of so many different things. (The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(40) It’s equally important that we consider the health of the mind body and soul.
The integration of the body and mind within this worldview is also implicit in the
following use of the term ‘gut feeling’, which is a common idiom used to refer to
an instinctive feeling about something. However, in this case both the literal and
figurative meanings are brought out, with the feeling being ascribed to an imbal-
162 Penelope Scott
ance in the gut. Through this a comment on the importance of gut health is made,
as well as on the need to pay attention to one’s feelings and instincts:
(41) And she said, with within a couple of days, “I was walking, I haven’t walked in
years, and I got out of bed”. She just said, you know, “you saved my life. And
why? Why didn’t anybody listen to me all these years” and we’re not trained to
listen, we don’t actually realize you have a gut feeling. And it is actually coming
from your gut. And we have to find out why you have that gut feeling.
In this example, the ‘gut feeling’ is part of a patient’s malaise that it is claimed con-
ventional medicine was unable to identify; thus, the perceived failure of science-
based medicine comes again from its lack of attention to ‘whole health’. Such an
anecdote reinforces the schemas food is medicine, physical health effects
spiritual and mental health, the self is composed of mind, body and
spirit. By signalling that ‘medicine’ lacks these schemas, such anecdotes draw on
individuals’ knowledge of cultural conceptualisations to the end that they become
very persuasive and may encourage a distrust in the medical establishment ‘other’.
The interconnectivity of these domains is a central feature of the concept of health
as wellness. This idea comes up a couple of times in the sampled data from the
Reddit communities, though it is not as prevalent as in goop, since only one con-
tributor mentions ‘spirit’, and no one refers to the ‘soul’.
(42) Get healthy, get lean, get toned, and get happy. Make a commitment to your-
self. Don’t just lose weight. Gain control of your life, mind, body, and spirit.
(Wellness Reddit)
There is however an extension of ‘detoxing’ from the body to the mind:

(43) I have been able to recover faster and improve by practicing mental detox.
(Detox Reddit)11
An aspect of the seemingly religious nature of wellness is the notion of ‘clean-

liness’, which is often taken to be synonymous with ‘purity’ and antonymous to
‘dirt’ or objects that are ‘unclean’. Interestingly, this is not an accurate represen-
tation of ‘clean’ in the podcasts, since the idea of ‘dirty’ foods or ‘unclean’ eating
was not found in the selected recordings, though the term ‘clean’ itself was very
common. A phrase that was used several times was ‘clean up [one’s diet/a recipe]’,
evoking more of a sense of sensible living. However, Reddit, which reflects every-
day usage in people who may not be professionally associated with the movement,
11. Notably, the Detox sub-Reddit is primarily concerned with the elimination of alcohol and
drugs from the body, as opposed to general environmental toxins as found in the other texts.
Wellness 163
does occasionally speak about other types of diet in more disparaging terms. We
see for example one post referring to the ‘dirty dozen’, and another that considers
the opposite of ‘clean’ eating to be ‘dirty’ or ‘unclean’:
(44) only thing that works for me that I shop on Friday and lock my wallet into the
safe box container with timer for 6.5 days = 6 clean days 1 dirty.
(45) I lost 60 lbs eating clean 80–20. 80% clean 20% unclean. (Clean Eating Reddit)
There is also evidence for the division of food into ‘bad’ and ‘good’:
(46) Finding more bad things: Bubbies pickles and even sauerkraut have chemicals.
(47) […] You’ve been conditioned (as most of us have) to believe eating these crap
foods are the normal way of life, and so once the huge change like you’ve done,
it’s pretty alarming to the body as it becomes dependent on the salt, sugar, and
bad fats that are abundant in the modern processed diet, and so there will be
withdrawls …. (Clean Eating Reddit)
(48) […] as long as youve cut out most bad carbs and sugars then you don’t have to
worry as much as about fats. (Clean Eating Reddit)
Overall, the discourse of wellness does appear to encourage a binary categori-

sation of foods, and while that simplicity is in common with notions of reli-
gious purity, there is limited evidence in the Reddit posts for religious schemas
underpinning wellness, or the integration of ‘spiritual’ health as a major part of
wellness. According to Sharifian (2011: 7–8) in his ‘distributed model’ of cultural
cognition, members of a cultural group may not necessarily share all elements of
a cultural schema. In this instance, we see that the notion of spiritual health is not
necessarily shared across the whole group. Certain other conceptualisations such
as the cultural metaphors food as medicine and wellness as a journey are well
represented across both data sources. Another conceptualisation that is very well-
represented relates to the notion of toxins, which is part of the sociological con-
cept of ‘Risk Society’ discussed by Beck (1992).
5.3 Toxins and ‘risk’
Douglas (1992) explains how cultures may differ in their responses to ill fortune,
particularly with respect to the assigning of blame. She notes that in many Euro-
pean societies risk has replaced earlier models of blame, including, for example,
worldviews in which a person may be held responsible on account of a moral
failing. She argues that since many risks come from large corporate systems, the
164 Penelope Scott
individual is less likely to be held accountable, rendering it a relatively ‘generous’

model (Douglas 1992: 16). Within cultural groups with a wellness conceptuali-
sation of health, ‘risk society’ is an important cultural model that is compatible
with some of the other schemas we have examined. To begin, we can see the rejec-
tion of food companies and government recommendations in the idea that many
mainstream foods such as wheat flour are unhealthy. This is a movement coming
out of the ‘counter culture’ of the 1960s and 1970s. In the naturopathic understand-
ing of illness and healing in which the body heals itself, environmental toxins are
the principal antagonists to this process, explaining why elimination diets to pro-
mote healing and health are considered so important. Thus, wellness is inti-
mately related to ‘risk society’ with a high degree of schema overlap. The following
examples from goop and Reddit pertain to this worldview:
(49) […] throughout time our society has become more and more toxic I mean it’s
been estimated that we have something in the order of 80000 different chemi-
cals in the environment and every year close to 2500 new chemicals are intro-
duced. (The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(50) And then we look at all the chemicals that are out there and try to figure out,
first of all, what they are.
(The goop Podcast – “How to avoid the chemicals that disrupt hormones”)
(51) […] testing hair products for the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals.
(52) There’s really such a wide range of organs and systems in the bodies that are
affected by chemicals.
(53) […] we’re exposed to toxins.
(54) I agree like a very profound experience whether you’re framing it under trying
to get rid of environmental toxins or you’re just taking a moment to really
reframe your life. (The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(55) I mean they’re [chemicals] all out there in the environment so it’s [detox] a
necessity. It’s no longer a luxury it’s truly something that we have to do to sta-
bilise and sustain our health. (The goop Podcast – “Detox without deprivation”)
(56) I’ve read that these could be signs that my body is detoxing from the gunk I’ve
eaten. (Clean Eating Reddit)
(57) I initially started bc once I learned how dangerous the chemicals in traditional
food are. (Clean Eating Reddit)
Wellness 165
The following proposition schemas underpin the toxicity sub-model of ‘risk soci-
ety’. The latter two incorporate naturopathy and risk.
the environment contains many toxins
many diseases are caused by a buildup of toxins
many foods are toxic
some foods are ‘clean’ and help to remove toxins
the body will heal itself only if toxins are eliminated
Notably, ‘chemical’ is practically synonymous with ‘toxin’ in this discourse, with
no neutral usages or suggestions that there are ‘natural’ chemicals. They are elim-
inated either by restricting the diet and environmental exposure or by purging,
which is suggestive of the ideal body as a container that can be cleaned or pol-
luted. In common with early conceptions of purity and pollution is the notion
that illness may follow from pollution, but the difference is that it is not spiritual
moral pollution, but physical chemical pollution, and instead of the individual
being to blame, it is corporations. In other words, some of the historically attested
cultural schemas remain the same but when framed in terms of a different model
of risk, they change in meaning. However, once a person is informed of this state
of affairs, it also implicitly becomes their responsibility to follow the detox tenets
in order to protect themselves, meaning that blame ultimately may come to be laid
upon the ‘risky’ individual. Detoxing can be seen as a way for people to gain a
sense of control over their health.
As Beck explains, individuals within the ‘risk society’ become “incompetent in
matters of their own affliction” (1992: 53, emphasis original), because the under-
standing, for example, of whether “DDT is contained in the tea or formaldehyde
in the cake, and in what dose, remains outside the reach of their own knowledge
just as much as does the question of whether and in what concentrations these
substances have a long- or short-term deleterious effect” (1992: 53). This sense of
control also links with the ‘countercultural’ approach to health we have seen, in
which a loss of trust in the establishment is evident.
6. Summary
The cultural conceptualisation of wellness, as evidenced in The goop Podcast and

in the Clean Eating, Wellness, and Detox sub-Reddits is broadly split into three
models, which I will term the whole health, detox, and countercultural models,
each of which comprises the following proposition schemas:
166 Penelope Scott
The ‘countercultural approach to science and medicine’ model

conventional doctors do not accept new ideas
scientific ideas are fixed
science changes and is often wrong
The ‘whole health’ model

the self is composed of mind, body and spirit
spiritual and mental health effects physical health
physical health effects spiritual and mental health
The ‘detox’ model

the environment contains many toxins
many diseases are caused by a buildup of toxins
many foods are toxic
some foods are ‘clean’ and help to remove toxins
the body will heal itself only if toxins are eliminated
The ‘detox’ model in particular constitutes part of a wider model of ‘risk’ (Beck
1992), and is well-represented by both text types. The schema the body will
heal itself only if toxins are eliminated rests on another more general med-
ical schema derived from naturopathy which is the body heals itself. The
‘whole health’ model emphasises the importance of spiritual health, and is partic-
ularly prevalent in goop podcasts, as is the ‘countercultural’ model. wellness is
also structured by several cultural metaphors:
food as medicine
wellness as a journey
the body as a balanced system
whole food as clean food
These metaphors for the most part have a long history; the body as a balanced
system can be seen in Galen’s humoural theory of medicine, as can food as med-
icine. wellness as a journey is part of the classic life is a journey metaphor
and has implications for the conceptualisation of health and wellness insofar as it
ceases to be merely a ‘destination’ within life’s ‘journey’ but can become a journey
in itself. whole food as clean food is linked to the countercultural model, since
clean comes to entail that which has not been altered by mainstream ‘technolog-
ical’ or ‘scientific’ processes. In fact, foods that are literally dirtier in the sense of
being unwashed come to be ‘cleaner’ within the worldview, as long as they remain
‘whole’.
Wellness 167
7. Conclusion
wellness reflects one possible conceptualisation of health and represents a cul-

tural model that is shared to a greater or lesser extent by individuals with interests
in alternative medicine, spiritual health, and detoxing. This chapter has shown
that wellness is structured by three cultural models and is far from homogenous.
Some aspects of the models, such as the specific version of the journey metaphor,
may be beneficial in allowing for more diverse health states and in the rejection of
the overly binary ‘absence of illness’ conception of health described by Dolfman
(1973). The perceived control over one’s health may also provide comfort to peo-
ple experiencing illness. However, the effect of the countercultural approach to
science and medicine as well as the oppositional discourse discussed earlier may
cause some individuals to reject evidence-based medicine to their detriment, par-
ticularly when promoted by individuals sharing the same cultural models. We
have seen examples in which narrative is used in such a way as to reinforce these
cultural conceptualisations and to emphasise the absence of such schemas within
the worldview of the ‘establishment’, resulting in a persuasive discourse. In cases
in which such anecdotes promote the rejection of science-based medicine there is
the potential for them to be unhelpful.
While spiritual health is a component of the conceptualisation of ‘whole’
health, which incorporates the mind, body and spirit, its relationship to health-
related conceptualisations is distinct from earlier models of health; though the
Old English term for health could refer to spiritual health, there was not a sense
in which physical health could lead to spiritual health. This essay has argued that
Cultural Linguistics is well-equipped to account for a a complex model such as
this and is able to reflect the internal diversity of conceptions of wellness that is
in evidence.
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Critical Cultural Linguistics (CCL)
Challenging the cultural (re)production
of Otherness
Paola Giorgis
Cultural Linguistics analyses the relation between language and cultural

conceptualizations, studying how linguistic interactions influence the
development of cultural conceptualizations, and, at the same time, how
language structure and use draw on and reflect cultural conceptualizations
(Palmer 1996; Sharifian and Palmer 2007; Sharifian 2011, 2017). Yet, if
cultural conceptualizations are encoded and embodied in language, they are
by no means neutral or accidental. Therefore, I would add a critical
perspective to Cultural Linguistics by speaking of ‘Critical Cultural
Linguistics’ to sustain the non-neutrality of the conceptualizations that
define our experiences, and to foreground how cultural conceptualizations
are shaped by contexts, conditions, power relations, unequal access to
cultural and natural resources, as well as by socio-cultural and historical
factors (Giorgis 2017).
I will examine the potential of the Critical Cultural Linguistics paradigm
from an interdisciplinary perspective, analysing some examples of how
language conceptualizes and (re)produces Otherness and the much too
short step between the cultural conceptualization of the Other and the
cultural conceptualization of the Enemy. After having examined cases from
Literature, the Media, and studies on Critical Linguistics, I will argue that a
critical approach to foreign languages and foreign language education can
problematize the conceptualization of Otherness. To ground such an
argument, I will draw on my experience as a practitioner describing a
classroom activity which uses the foreignness that foreign languages
foreground to reflect on pre-given assumptions on languages and cultures –
one’s own included. The outcome of this activity put into evidence in which
way Critical Cultural Linguistics can become a very promising field for both
critical (foreign) language education and critical intercultural
communication.
Keywords: Critical Cultural Linguistics, Otherness (the construction of ),

intercultural education, foreign-language education
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.07gio
Critical Cultural Linguistics (CCL) 171
1. The context/s: Who is the Other?
In Italy, when children are fussing and don’t want to do what they are told, there
is a sentence that parents often say: “Se non ti comporti bene – se non vai subito a
letto, se non finisci la tua cena, ecc. – vado a chiamare l’uomo nero” [‘If you don’t
behave well – or go to bed immediately, finish your meal, etc. – I’ll go and call the
Black Man’]. In the Italian folklore l’uomo nero, the Black Man, is an evil figure:
he can be half demon half human, he can be wearing black clothes, but in all rep-
resentations he is, unmistakably, black; in nursery rhymes and lullabies, the Black
Man is depicted as a threatening figure who takes children away from their par-
ents, sometimes also to feed on them.
Let’s move to another continent. Raul Pantaleo is an architect who builds hos-
pitals in several areas of the world working for Emergency (www.emergency.it),
an Italian NGO which offers free and quality health care to people affected by
war and poverty, and affirms human rights through direct action. Some years ago,
Raul was building a hospital in Sudan. At the end of a long day of work, he was
drinking karkadé [a flower herbal tea] with Elias, the construction foreman, when
the man suddenly confided to him that Sudanese mothers threaten their kids by
saying: “If you don’t behave well, I’ll go and call the White Man. So, beware of the
White Man!”. Therefore, when Elias, as a kid, first saw a white man, he ran away
in terror and tears (Pantaleo 2007: 61–62). Though reversed, here we can see the
same pattern: the cultural conceptualization of the Other as a dangerous and evil
figure. Yet, depending on where/by whom/from which perspective/under which
conditions the sentence is uttered, the scaring figure is conceptualized either as
black or white.
Indeed, “being essentially about social relationships, Otherness depends on
context, situational position and time” (Praxmarer 2014–2016, online reference).
All these elements converge into the core issue of who has the power to define the
Other as such:
[T]hree mobility revolutions of the past decades (human migrations, new infor-
mation and communication technologies and flows, and globalizing markets)
have destroyed relatively stable and territorialized figures of the Other and cre-
ated new, transient, ever changing and space-independent figures, such as the
refugee, the immigrant, the migrant labourer, the ‘global nomad’, but also the
ubiquitous (inner) enemy or terrorist. (ibidem)
If Otherness “is constitutively and inexorably linked with Sameness and Self – no
conceptualization of the Other (‘Them’) is possible without a conceptualization
of Same and Self (‘Us’)” (ibidem), the point is who can decide and from which
positioning who is ‘Us’ (the in-group) and who is ‘Them’ (the out-group).
172 Paola Giorgis
Being constitutive of the relationship within and between individual and col-
lective identities, the construct – and the construction of Otherness – has been
widely explored and analysed from several different perspectives and by many
disciplines, notably by psychological and anthropological studies which, follow-
ing their main paradigms, have respectively considered what defines Otherness as
related to the Self or as the cultural Other. The focus of this contribution, though,
is on the relationship between Otherness and language, and in particular on how
language can create or problematize Otherness. And, as one of the most promi-
nent experiences of Otherness is the encounter with an-other language, I will here
advance that a critical approach to the experience of foreign languages and foreign
language education can problematize cultural conceptualizations of others which
are ordinarily taken for granted – as well those regarding the Self, too.
2. The framework: Cultural Linguistics and Critical Cultural Linguistics
“Power, government, war, law, punishment, and a thousand other things,

had no terms wherein that language could express them,
which made the Difficulty almost insuperable,
to give my Master any Conception of what I meant”
(Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)
Encountering the civilized and much too rational society of the Houuyhnhnms,
Lemuel Gulliver finds it impossible to explain to his Master the meaning of some
words. For example, he notices that they have no names to designate ‘lie’, ‘power’,
‘war’ or ‘pride’: the Houuyhnhnms cannot conceptualize what these words mean
because they don’t lie, don’t exercise power, don’t make wars, and have no experi-
ence of the vice of pride. Gulliver also notes that the Houuyhnhnms have no terms
to express anything that is evil – except for those needed to describe the despica-
ble qualities of the vile Yahoos. While showing us Gulliver’s helpless effort in such
endeavour, Jonathan Swift is in reality compelling us to notice that while the Hou-
uyhnhnms don’t need such words, we have execrably built entire civilizations on
them. As all throughout his novel Gulliver’s Travels, Swift speaks of the foreigner
to unveil the familiar: Swift’s game apparently played on Gulliver’s back is meant
to show us the dark mirror of our own cultures, presumptions and certainties,
an approach that will be much later explored by Critical Anthropology. To pro-
ceed in such a reverse account, Swift rejoices in putting his gullible protagonist
in uncomfortable situations, and often obliges him to understand the societies he
visits through their languages, in turn obliging the reader to reflect critically on
languages and cultures.
Indeed, Swift’s interest in the link between language and culture emerges well
before Von Humboldt, Boas, and Sapir and Whorf, who, in different ways, sus-
tain the mutual influence of language and culture in shaping the word-world link.
The words we need to describe the world around us tell us about our own view
of the world, and vice versa, as it is the world around us that shapes the words we
need to experience, describe and make sense of it. When, in Aboriginal English,
an Aborigine says: “This land is me”, we are not hearing a grammar mistake (the
personal pronoun object instead of the possessive) or a figurative use of language,
but we are presented with a different worldview which considers humans and the
earth as one being, and their relation as based on identity (“I am the land”) rather
than on possession (“I own the land”).
The vocabulary of a language reflects the physical and social environment:
Cultural Linguistics examines the relation between language, culture and con-
ceptualizations (Palmer 1996; Sharifian & Palmer 2007; Sharifian 2017). Drawing
from the long tradition of Boasian Linguistics and Linguistic Ethnography, Cul-
tural Linguistics sustains the fundamental role of culture in shaping the language,
which in turn shapes the way in which we conceptualize experience. Analysing
how cultural conceptualizations affect language and language interactions, Cul-
tural Linguistics has proved to be particularly effective in studying cases of inter-
cultural communication (and miscommunication), showing that, besides
linguistic and communicative competence, we should also develop metacultural
competence to understand how different speakers conceptualize experience in
different languages (Sharifian 2013).
Yet, if cultural conceptualizations are encoded and embodied in language,
they are by no means neutral or accidental. Our conceptualizations do not come
‘naturally’, but are rather determined and produced by cultural, social, political
processes which frame and impact on our experience of the world, of ourselves
and of others. Therefore, I would add a critical perspective to Cultural Linguistics
by speaking of ‘Critical Cultural Linguistics’ to sustain the non-neutrality of the
conceptualizations that define our experiences, and to foreground how cultural
conceptualizations are shaped by contexts, conditions, power relations, unequal
access to cultural and natural resources, as well as by socio-cultural and historical
factors (Giorgis 2017). Therefore, I also foster that studies within the perspective
of Critical Cultural Linguistics can cast a light on what lies behind cultural con-
ceptualizations and on how language can (re)produce or challenge them. Being
critical, Critical Cultural Linguistics should consider interdisciplinarity as one of
its most prominent features, as it is only by interconnecting elements and per-
spectives, as well as research and practices, that phenomena can be read in their
complexity. To evidence such stances, I will discuss some examples of how lan-
guage conceptualizes and (re)produces Otherness from an interdisciplinary point
174 Paola Giorgis
of view analysing several examples from different fields and contexts. Drawing on
my experience as a practitioner, I will present a classroom activity which uses the
foreignness that foreign languages foregrounds as a critical and intercultural expe-
rience to reflect on pre-given assumptions on cultural conceptualizations regard-
ing not just the Other, but the Same, too.
3. The role of language in the cultural conceptualization of the Other as

the enemy
“The question is”, said Alice,

“whether you can make words mean so different things”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty,
“which is to be master – that’s all”. (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
From the cultural conceptualization of the Other to the cultural conceptualization

of the Enemy there is only a small step. History and contemporary events provide
hundreds of examples, as well as reversions: yesterday’s friends (‘Us’) can become
today’s enemies (‘Them’), as for example in the case of the Western representa-
tions of the Soviets during World War II, when they were portrayed as endowed
with all kinds of good qualities, and the representations of the Soviets after World
War II, when they were depicted as the source and the perpetrators of every pos-
sible evil.
Other examples come from two epitomical books, Victor Klemperer’s LTI –
Linguae Tertii Imperii – The Language of the Third Reich [1947], (2000), and
George Orwell’s 1984 [1949], (2003). They both discuss how totalitarian systems
(be it real, as in Klemperer, or fictional, as in Orwell) use language, creating new
words or twisting the old ones to manipulate and frame people’s minds and feel-
ings as well as their apprehension and reading of reality, with the consequence
that such narratives turn into actual deeds – from private acts of aggression to
organized mass crimes. While for Klemperer keeping a diary to analyse the lan-
guage of the Third Reich was, in his own words, “an act of self-defence” (2000
[1947]: 8) at a time when he, a Jewish university professor in Nazi Germany, was
being deprived of everything – his job, his house, his dignity, Orwell’s novel is a
desperate warning about the risks of an all-encompassing totalitarianism of the
future. There are indeed striking similarities between the two works, as the lin-
guistic mechanisms they unveil are very much the same, such as: the repetition of
words used as slogans; the cutting down and the simplification of words and con-
cepts; the utilization of euphemisms, contractions and abbreviations; the rewrit-
ing of geography and history to fit the new ideology; the appeal to emotions and
sentimentalism to replace knowledge with faith; the manipulation of the media

and the propaganda machine; the creation of new words, or the reversal of the
meaning of the old ones (Giorgis 2018b).
Yet, not only totalitarian systems use language in such a way, since also
democracies deploy similar strategies. The comparison between how the Jews
were depicted during the Italian Fascist Regime and how immigrants are por-
trayed in Italian contemporary political and public debate presents disturbing
analogies. Sentences such as “Gli ebrei considerano l’Italia come un albergo” [The
Jews consider Italy as a hotel] (Gli ebrei bàrano, Il Tevere, 22–23 November, 1937;
in Pezzetti and Berger 2017: 124) and “Troppi ebrei circolano ancora in Italia,
gavazzano e s’impinguano nei luoghi di villeggiatura” [Too many Jews still ram-
ble around in Italy, feasting and fattening in holiday resorts] (Erasmo, Spunti ed
appunti, Combattere, Bolzano, 03 November, 1941; ibidem: 127) sound not too
far from what Matteo Salvini, the former Italian Interior Minister (2018–2019),
repeatedly declared on several public occasions (June 2, June 3, November 29,
2018, to name just a few): “Per i migranti la pacchia è finita. È ora di fare le valigie”
[For the migrants the fun is over. Time to pack up]. Such words paint a clearly
delineated picture: before Salvini’s macho ministry, the migrants had been enjoy-
ing a sort of perpetual holiday in Italy, benefiting from privileges and opportuni-
ties denied to the Italians. We should indeed consider the use of the word ‘pacchia’
in this context. In Italian, pacchia is not only connected with the idea of ‘fun’, but
also with the idea of getting ‘a free and easy ride’ to one’s goals – concepts which
by no means can be associated to the migrants’ experience. The sums the migrants
have to pay to human traffickers; the internment in the detention camps in Libya;
the perilously crossing of the Mediterranean Sea; the exploitation by gang masters
or by criminal groups; the deprivation of food, shelter and dignity: these are just
few of the constituents which mark the migrants’ experience. Therefore, in such
an utterance there is a strategic subversion and redefinition of the word and the
concept of pacchia which is mobilized (and capitalized) to maliciously appeal to
the people’s worst instincts.1 The not so hidden sub-text is that while the Italians
are struggling to find a job or working hard to earn a living, the migrants arriving
in Italy are a privileged social group which is offered all sorts of benefits. The fact
1. Two Italian linguists, Giuseppe Antonelli and Luca Serianni, have analyzed the Newspeak
of Italian contemporary political debate devising some recurring strategies such as the use of
localisms, dialects, swearwords and even errors, employed with the purpose to show the pub-
lic opinion that politicians do not belong to an élite, but that they are ordinary people speak-
ing the colloquial language of ordinary people. Antonelli has also coined the word ‘emologismi’
[emologisms] to indicate new words or words whose meaning is subverted in order to create an
immediate irrational and emotional response (in Minardi, S., L’Espresso, 18 November, 2018, n.
47: 25).
176 Paola Giorgis
that the economic crisis has nothing to do with migrants but rather with neolib-
eralism (“in many respects the voice of global capitalism”, Holborow 2016) in all
its declinations – great finance speculations, delocalization, exploitation of people
and of the environment – is rarely, if ever, taken into consideration in the gen-
eral public discourse. Yet, such a convenient and strategic shortcut for problems
is not exclusively Italian. Also, the phenomena of new populisms, the resurgence
of nationalisms and even of fascism2 have become global, displaying similar char-
acteristics wherever they emerge: they create and play on people’s fear to justify a
severe limitation of rights and an increase of emergency and ‘security’ measures,
and fuel on people’s discontent and dissatisfaction to divert them on an easy tar-
get, the Other, who can easily be turned into the Enemy, the scapegoat of all evils
and problems.
Words are therefore by no means neutral in creating conceptualizations and
narratives of the Other. Yet, if some politicians use such patterns3 to secure their
power by creating consent, they are certainly not alone in playing this game. All
sorts of media, both traditional and social, vastly contribute to creating and rein-
forcing such narratives. When speaking of the migrants, they publish inflamma-
tory headlines or comments using metaphors picked up from the semantic fields
of war, invasion and emergency (“Emergency landings continue”; “Invasion of
illegal aliens”) or from the vocabulary connected to the animal or the biological
field (“Police have herded the migrants…”; “The migrants are swarming …”;
“Immigrants are like a spreading disease”). They also depict all migrants as ter-
rorists or define the nation as a ’container’ which is ‘flooded’ by newcomers. In
all these examples,4 we are witnessing the deliberate construction of a discourse
which installs fear of the Other and, at the same time, dehumanizes him/her with
2. Tracking the lines of the characteristics of what he called ‘Ur-Fascism’, Umberto Eco thus
wrote in 1995: “Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. This is why one of the
most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class
suffering from economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pres-
sure of the lower social groups” (New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995 issue).
3. A clear-cut comment which offers a counter-narrative to such discourses came from a quite
unexpected figure. Not from a radical activist or an academic, but from former Bay Watch star
Pamela Anderson who, worried for what she calls “a new form of fascism” in Italy, on her Twit-
ter feed on December 5, 2018 wrote: “The solution is not more Macron or more Salvini, they
actually need each other and reinforce each other, the solution can only be a Pan-European
awakening across borders and nationalities, which would be able to tackle the deep economic,
social and ecological crisis of Europe today”.
4. These examples are all part of a linguistic corpus research on the recurring negative topoi
on migrants presented by Monika Reif at CLIC-LAUD Conference, Landau, July 2018 (see Reif
this volume).
the intent to desensitize public opinion and direct their anxieties and discontent
against a specific category of individuals. People can be easily indoctrinated to
despise and hate certain groups, and as Hannah Arendt (1963) poignantly showed,
even the most ordinary person can be induced to perpetrate hideous mass crimes.
It is only a short step from words to deeds, as several recent studies have also
shown (e.g., Müller and Schwarz 2018), documenting the increase of hate crimes
following the proliferation of hate speech. Therefore, how words are used and
manipulated is the key factor which creates specific narratives with the power to
shape the individuals’ representation and interpretation of reality.
Another example of how language can create the enemy by de-humanizing
the Other comes from a speech delivered by a veteran of the British Army at
the Annual Meeting of the Veterans for Peace.5 The young man overtly declares
that language plays a fundamental role in military training, for example through
the use of words which de-humanize the person. This young soldier says that,
in Afghanistan, he did not think he was shooting at a person or at a family, but
at a ‘target’. Through a substitution of words (‘target’ instead of ‘person’), human
beings are deprived of their humanity, becoming things, targets to aim at. Such
strategic linguistic devices recall the Nazi manipulation of language which used a
deliberate ‘scientification’ of words, as for example when men, women and chil-
dren arriving in the concentration camps were deprived of their humanity to be
turned into numbers in the vast bureaucratic system of mass murder; or when the
Fascist propaganda used a term taken from the medical jargon to define Jews as
‘un pericolo biologico’ [a biological hazard], an infection which was contaminat-
ing and corrupting the pure Italian race. In all these cases, terms taken from the
apparently neutral and objective terminology of exact sciences – such as the nat-
ural sciences, mathematics, medicine and the like – are used to deprive humans
of their humanity and reduce human beings to targets, numbers, or parasites in
order to justify and even celebrate acts of oppression, violence and murder against
them.
Besides the use of neutralized or para-scientific words, democracies often use
euphemisms to fondle and confound public opinion, edulcorating meanings to
hide hard facts and disturbing truths. A rather interesting example comes, again,
from the military context. In Italy, military missions are called ‘Missioni di Pace’
[Missions of Peace] because Article 11 of the Italian Constitution (significantly
5. The specific video I discuss here, which had been online been until July 2018, has now
apparently been removed. Here are the references and the link to the video I refer to: Sharrocks,
W. (2016). Construction of the Enemy. Speech delivered at The Veterans for Peace UK Annual
Gathering, London, Dec. 2016 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMD5EcaqsI]. There are
though many other similar videos at the link of the Veterans for Peace UK: http://vfpuk.org/.
178 Paola Giorgis
signed after World War II) explicitly declares that Italy rejects war as a way to
solve international conflicts. Therefore, while in US and UK newspapers the mili-
tary presence of their armies in, for example, Afghanistan was openly defined as a
‘military mission’, the presence of Italian military troops in the same area was rep-
resented in the Italian media more like a mission of good will enacted by people
who happen to wear a uniform, carry guns and drive on tanks. Different words
create different narratives of the same scenario, causing surreal effects in every
reader who ventured to open an English and an Italian newspaper reporting the
same event.
Indeed, the manipulation of language has proved to serve power and its mul-
tifold agendas on many occasions and in many directions throughout history.
As pointed out well in Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny’s (2017) historical
account of how language ideologies have contributed to creating inequalities and
stigmatizing difference throughout the centuries, “ideas about language play a
central role in the making of social difference and social inequality” (2017: 2). The
point is therefore to understand how some languages and language ideologies
“become hegemonic and others marginalized and erased” (ibidem: 8) and “why
and when certain ideas happen, with an explicit argument that ideas also change
because material and symbolic conditions for making their meaning and value
change” (ibidem: 10; italics in the original).
The evidence that languages are affected by ideologies and historically deter-
mined can be seen in the current war on Ukraine. In a recent podcast by The
Guardian (Dec. 9, 2022), Hannah Moore and Charlotte Higgins, the chief culture
writer of the newspaper, discuss how Putin’s war on Ukraine is also a war against
Ukranian culture. Putin claims that Ukraine is part of Russia not only in terms
of territory, but also of culture and language. Stealing pieces of arts and precious
icons, and bombing libraries are war-tactics to annihilate Ukraine people by anni-
hilating their culture. Therefore, Ukranian artists, musicians, video makers, and
writers see their works as weapons of resistance against the aggression. Language
plays a fundamental role in this act of resistance and defiance: poetry in particu-
lar is experiencing a vast production in the country, and poets are writing poems
in Ukranian to preserve their language but also as an occasion to decolonize com-
pletely from Russian. And many of those who can speak Russian are now refusing
to use this language which they associate to the language of aggression, violence
and terror.
The interweawing of ideology and historical conditions is very clear when
observed through the lens of how foreign languages and foreign language edu-
cation are considered within a specific country and in a determined period of
history. Indeed, observing things from an-other perspective or, even better, from
several other perspectives, is always a good exercise to destabilize one’s certainties
and visualize better what lies inside the folds of discourses and processes that are
taken for granted. This is precisely the purpose of this contribution: observing
the object ‘language’ from the apparently lateral angle of foreign languages and
foreign language education to unveil how language and language ideologies con-
tribute to the construction, the conceptualization and the representation of Oth-
erness. The perspective of foreign languages can help devise which are the
mechanisms underlying such processes, posing the fundamental questions of
who, on which grounds, from which positioning and for which purposes has the
power to define the Other as such and as the ‘foreigner’ – and, consequently, her/
his language as a ‘foreign language’. For example, the imposition of a monolingual
policy by totalitarian systems is connected to the construction of a national iden-
tity as opposed to other national identities. An instance is that of the Nazis, who
spoke of bilingualism as ‘mercenary relativism’ and considered bi- or plurilingual
individuals as ambiguous and immoral since they can change their principles and
values just like they can change their language (Pavlenko 2006: 3). Yet, depend-
ing on whether the foreign language stems from the centres of power or from its
periphery, it may be strictly forbidden or brutally imposed: to ‘civilize’ the natives
as in the case of colonialism, or to annihilate other national languages and cul-
tures in order to reinforce the centrality of the state, as in the case of the former
USSR. In both cases, the repression or the imposition of the foreign language are
two sides of the same coin as they converge in the monolingual ideology which is
used as a political weapon, thus showing that it really depends from which per-
spective one has the power to observe/conceptualise/represent ‘foreignness’, the
‘foreign language’, and the ‘foreigner’ as such.
In her study on the relationship between national identities and foreign lan-
guage education policies and practices, Aneta Pavlenko (2003) evidenced how
national identity ideologies and socio-political allegiances define and impact on
how foreign languages are viewed, taught and learnt. She analysed texts and mem-
oirs to show how foreign language education can be discarded as ‘teaching the
language of the Enemy’, as in the case of German in the US on the verge of (and
post) World War I, or imposed as the language of the colonizer or the political ally
(e.g., Russian in former Eastern European countries after World War II). Bringing
forth several documents, Pavlenko demonstrates how the anti-German sentiment
of the early 20th century together with American isolationism and national-
ism impacted on foreign language ideologies and practices banishing bilingual
instruction from most schools, while Russian and Soviet ideology imposed on
students of the Eastern countries sometimes incited them to develop critical resis-
tance. As Pavlenko observes when comparing stances toward ‘languages of the
enemy’ taken in in the US and the USSR during different time periods,
180 Paola Giorgis
we can see that there is more than one way in which such languages can be
treated: in some contexts, students are prohibited or at least discouraged to learn
the language of the perceived ‘enemy’, and in others they are encouraged to do so.
(Pavlenko 2003: 326)
As seen above, both prohibition and imposition involve coercion. Yet, as Gramsci
pointed out, there is another route to domination besides coercion – that is con-
sent, which in turn is never entirely spontaneous, as it is a product of economic
and socio-political processes. In the last decades, the English language can be
taken as a good example of a language whose spread has been moving in-between
coercion and consent. As the global language of late capitalism and neoliberal-
ism, it has imposed its own rules (e.g., it has globally colonized the vocabulary of
finance, as well as locally renamed all Houssems and Lalis who, from Tunisia and
India, have to answer from the call centres as James and Sarah), but it has also
represented the perfect example of ‘soft power’ (another way to name ‘consent’ in
a non-overtly coercive way) in the creation and standardization of global desires,
consumptions and must-haves, sometimes even favouring some forms of empow-
erment and upward mobility (Sharifian 2009).
In the last decades, the manifold manifestations and declinations of the Eng-
lish language have triggered hundreds of studies which examine the link between
English, globalization, and power. Some studies advance that precisely because of
its global spread English can support projects of mutual understanding between
people (Birch and Nasser 2017), or develop counter discourses through critical
awareness on language and power (Pennycook 1994); others distinctly denounce
its connection with power ideologies, domination and neo-colonialism
(Fairclough 1989; Phillipson 1992), in particular when implicated in the dissemi-
nation of English via the multinational enterprise of TESOL – Teaching English
to Speakers of Other Languages (Luke 2004; Ramanathan and Morgan 2009).
In-between these polarized positions, there are the considerations of those who
observe the pluralization of English as a de facto phenomenon that has indeed
to be analysed critically, but, at the same time, cannot be dismissed a priori: an
ideological opposition to English as the tout court language of power and dom-
ination can produce the opposite effect of what it aims to contrast, leading to
further marginalization of the most disadvantaged (Luke 2004) and, given the
expanded community of users, possibly undermining the possibility of devel-
oping critical and insurgent knowledge (Pennycook 1994). Further strands are
the studies examining English as a Lingua Franca which, being a language (pre-
dominantly) spoken by non-native speakers with different mother tongues and
different cultures, definitively moves away from the paradigm ‘one nation = one
language = one culture’ and from the construct of ‘nativeness’. English as a Lingua
Franca then critically addresses language and language ideologies from the per-
spective of the plurality of uses and users, rather than from that of the adherence
to a specific normative standard of the language (Seidlhofer 2004; Dewey 2007;
Baker 2017). Yet, far from pretending to be the magic solution to equal communi-
cations across the globe, precisely because it is a language favouring interactions
between non-native speakers, English as a Lingua Franca overtly exposes socio-
cultural disparities and different statuses of power which particularly emerge in
asymmetrical relations as, for example, those between refugees and Italian cus-
toms officers (Guido 2008).
As well evidenced by a critical approach to the paradigm of English as a Lin-
gua Franca, Otherness is not wiped out by the use of the ‘same’ language, as
differences meaningfully haul from one language to another (and, incidentally,
within one single language too), openly foregrounding to which extent Otherness
is defined by power relations, as well as constructed and situated. Within such a
framework, it is then relevant to examine how a critical approach to foreign lan-
guages and foreign language education can instill a critical vision in the essential-
ized and stereotypized construction of Otherness.
4. The role of foreign languages and foreign language education in

problematizing and challenging the cultural conceptualization of
Otherness
Foreign, adj.: Belonging to another and inferior country.

Foreigner, n.: A villain regarded with various and varying degrees
of toleration, according to his conformity
to the eternal standard of our conceit
and the shifting one of our interests. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)
As seen above, language is by no means neutral in (re)producing cultural con-

ceptualizations and narratives on Otherness. Yes, it can also play a role in prob-
lematizing and challenging such conceptualizations and narratives, for example
through a critical approach to one of the most evident and prominent experiences
of Otherness: an-other language. If, according to Pavlenko (2003), foreign lan-
guages and foreign language education can serve ideologies to construct the Other
(and the Other as the Enemy) and reinforce stereotypes, a critical approach to
foreign language education can do the opposite, working in the direction of prob-
lematizing Otherness and stereotyped conceptualizations of Otherness.
I take stereotypes as conceptualized generalizations assumed to apply to all
members of a specific social category (Pierik 2004). Such generalizations are
182 Paola Giorgis
based on ascription – when defined by others – and inscription – when self-

defined. While some specific attributes (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.)
“generate categories whose membership is not chosen deliberately” (2004: 537),
thus impacting on the agency of self-definition; at the same time, “as individuals,
persons experience the effects of processes of ascription because they are not
judged on their individual character and behaviour, but on their membership in a
category” (ibidem; italics in original).
Moreover, stereotypes are usually second-hand opinions – you do not meet
the group personally. I remember one of my former students, Leonardo, who
provocatively declared himself a racist. Quite significantly, he himself came from
a mixed background, but he claimed that the ‘Italian race’ was superior to all oth-
ers. When confronted with the fact that the Italian race (or any) does not sim-
ply exist, he insisted by saying that in any case other populations were inferior
to the Italians. During the breaks, he was always coupling, smoking and listening
to hip hop music with Ahmed, a young man who came from Morocco, and they
often met outside of school too. When invited to reflect on how he could combine
the evidence of his affection to Ahmed with his racist claims, Leonardo immedi-
ately answered: “Ah, but Ahmed is my friend!”.6 By having met Ahmed personally
and developed a relationship with him, Leonardo ascribed him to the category of
‘friends’ rather than to the one of ‘the Other’. This example shows that we always
meet individuals rather than cultures, evidence that has be kept in mind and high-
lighted, in particular by teachers and educators, in the endeavour to confront
stereotyped, stigmatized or folklorized7 visions of the Other.
One of the most relevant (and dangerous) characteristics of stereotypes is that
they are invisible. We take for granted, or assume as an undisputed and undis-
putable truth what, at its best, is a simplified and partial reading of complex
stories, and at its worst a deliberate construction to perpetuate discrimination,
6. Incidentally, such a contradiction has also been evidences by one Italian rapper, Salmo, who
is vastly appreciated by many young people such as Leonardo and Ahmed. In one of his latest
hits, 90 minutes, in which he describes contemporary Italy in bitter tones, Salmo writes: “Ehi
ehi, questa è l’Italia, è una mente contorta/Chiudi la bocca o ti levan la scorta/ Informazione, sai,
qui non informa/ I razzisti che ascoltano hip hop/ Qualcosa non torna” [Hey, hey, this is Italy, a
twisted mind/ Shut your mouth or they withdraw your security escort/ Information, you know,
here does not inform/ Racists listen to hip hop/ Something doesn’t add up].
7. It has to be noted that, though performed with the best of intentions, some intercultural
modules risk to fall in the same pattern they aim to contrast, as for example, celebrating diversi-
ties without addressing how, by whom, from which grounds and for which purposes ‘diversity’
is defined and (re)produced.
prejudice and injustice.8 And, of course, the most invisible stereotypes are the
ones that regard the ‘group’ or ‘social category’ we belong to or associate with our-
selves.
4.1 An activity9 conducted in class
The classroom activity I will illustrate in this section was to get students to reflect
upon the question of how Otherness is constructed, conceptualized, represented
and disseminated. The activity was part of an interdisciplinary project aimed
at developing intercultural awareness in the students as part of the process of
becoming ‘citizens of the world’ – individuals who are conscious of all the diversi-
ties which constitute our common world, of the challenges and the opportunities
that these diversities bring along, and of how we can deal with them. I decided
to develop my part of the project from the intercultural perspective of approach-
ing Otherness and Diversity from within, that is starting from a reflection upon
one’s own Otherness and Diversity. The class in which I conducted this activity
was composed of 21 students, aged between 18 and 20, and coming from different
linguacultural backgrounds – from different Italian regions and from Morocco,
Egypt and Eastern Europe. Besides their respective national languages, the stu-
dents with immigrant background spoke native-like Italian too, having attended
their school path in Italy since an early age. The activity was carried out in Eng-
lish, a foreign language to all students involved, and developed in the course of
several lessons. During the unfolding of the activity, I proposed a series of ques-
tions for the students to reflect upon, and encouraged them to bring forth ques-
tions of their own, as the activity was not aimed at offering answers, but rather at
eliciting questions and doubts, and at problematizing the taken-for-granted.
The activity was divided into several steps, and included watching some
videos, beginning with the TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009) by
the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie, who, swinging between humour and
gravity, presents several personal experiences – from children’s literature to peo-
8. It is worth mentioning that stereotypes are not, per se, negative. According to the Social
Cognition Theory, we actually need them as “a functional cognitive device by means of which
we systematize our social environment, creating distinct and apparently homogeneous cate-
gories” (Kristiansen 2001: 137). The problem arises when, instead of considering stereotypes as
socially relative, situated, and partial constructs, we take them as all-encompassing features of
a determined social group, and mobilize them to, e.g., trace hierarchical borders between ‘Us’
(the in-group) and ‘Them’ (the out-group). I am grateful to the comment of the anonymous
reviewer who allowed me to discuss this perspective.
9. This part is an adaptation of extended versions already published in Giorgis (2018a) and
Giorgis (2018b).
184 Paola Giorgis
ple’s preassumptions – which exemplify how stereotypes have accompanied her

all her life. The video triggered reflections and discussions on what can be the
‘dangers’ of attributing a ‘single story’ to someone, and while discussing we started
to realize that by framing the others into a single narrative, we not only lose their
multiplicity but ours as well. Such considerations led us to develop the next step,
‘Multiple Me’. I elicited the students’ reflections on how their individual identity
profiles change according to the situation, the context, the interlocutors (age, gen-
der, ethnicity, etc.), the language used, the expectations, etc., so that little by little
some core questions emerged: how many identities and cultures do we belong to/
affiliate with? How do we perceive or represent our own identity, as well as oth-
ers’, according to the language we use? Some examples were brought forth, as for
example those of a girl who reflected on how she perceived herself as different,
and was differently perceived, according to whether she was with her family, with
her boyfriend and with her friends – and depending on which friends she was
with. Another girl said she felt different when she was speaking in standard Italian
with her friends and in a local Italian dialect with her grandparents: she perceived
both varieties as ‘warm’, as they represented affectionate links but, at the same
time, she realized that they expressed different forms of affections, resulting in a
different expression of herself – casual with her friends, and both respectful and
protective with her grandparents. We were then ready to move on to the next step,
which got deeper in the reflection on the stereotypes, observing how ‘others’ see
‘us’, how ‘we’ see ‘the others’, and how stereotypes are created and disseminated by
the media.
As the most invisible stereotypes are those which regard the group we belong
to or associate with, I decided to work on stereotypes per via negativa, that is to
track the path from the opposite end. Thus, I did not start to address Otherness
from the perspective of ‘the Other’, the un-familiar, but from the perspective of
the familiar, showing the students several videos of stereotypes on ‘the Italians’.
Here are some of the stereotypes we pinpointed from the videos: ‘the Italians’
always wear stylish clothes and like to exhibit fashion brands; they are always
loud and late; they always drink espresso or red wine; they always eat spaghetti
or pizza; they always drive crazily and park even worse; they always gesticulate;
etc. While watching these videos, the students began to feel uneasy, noticing that
the use of the generic and general word ‘Italians’ did not fit with their many dif-
ferent attitudes, origins and affiliations, and overtly expressed their dissent: “I am
not like that!”, “This is not me!”, etc. We therefore began to reflect upon the ques-
tion of what the word ‘Italian’ means: what does it mean to be Italian? To speak
Italian? To be born in Italy? Children of immigrants who were born in Italy and
speak Italian are not legally considered as Italian citizens, while people whose Ital-
ian origins reach far back, who were born and live abroad, and cannot speak a
word of Italian, are.10 Is there something else that can define ‘the Italian’ as such?
Due to its long history of invasions and migrations, Italy presents indeed a highly
heterogeneous population in terms of languages, dialects, physical features, cus-
toms, cultures, and attitudes. We then began discussing that if those inconsisten-
cies emerged so clearly when considering ‘Italian’ as a general category, the same
could happen when applying similar general categories to the others, as stereo-
types do not consider individual differences, personal attitudes, characteristics or
tastes, which may have little or nothing to do with the national or ethnic belong-
ing – the favourite dish of a girl from Romania was, for example, chicken curry, a
taste which is linked neither to her national origins nor to her Italian background.
The discussion went on and it was very vibrant and participated, and it critically
evidenced how stereotypes tell just one part of the complex story of individuals,
so that we were ready to continue with the next step and watch a video on how
the Other is stereotyped.
In the following lesson, we watched a silent video of a young black man who,
on St. Valentine’s Day, walks through Milan with a bunch of roses in his hands.
He passes along several couples, and they all make a gesture of refusal. He enters
a restaurant, and both the waiter and a customer make the same gesture. At the
end, the young man finally reaches a table where a girl is waiting for him, and he
gives her the roses, making us realize that he is not a flower vendor, but a man
who is offering roses to his lover. The video plays on the subversion of our imag-
ined expectations on the protagonist, the context, and the action, and by subvert-
ing our expectations and beliefs it exposes our conceptualized stereotype of the
young man – he is black with a bunch of flowers = he is a flower vendor, not a man
in love. We worked a lot with students on discussing how cultural generalizations
of Otherness can lead to viewing the others as compact and static groups, with-
out considering the manifold dynamic and situated differences which compose
all of us. The activity continued in the following lessons and through different
steps, including the meeting with some refugees, who contributed to problematiz-
ing the stereotype of ‘the refugee’ as disseminated in the public discourse: without
silencing the problems and constraints they have to deal with, the refugees also
offered another part of the story, presenting students with their knowledge, skills
and resources.
At the end of the activity, we considered whether the path we had been walk-
ing together had somehow changed the perspective from which we look at the
others and at ourselves too. Students agreed that the activity had indeed helped
them pluralize their view of the Other, but of themselves as well. They also
reflected on how Otherness is situated as, though often represented as a static
10. For a detailed discussion on the ius soli debate in Italy, see Giorgis (2018b).
186 Paola Giorgis
quality of certain groups or individuals, it is rather a general condition: not only

are we all ‘the Other’ to someone else, but our ‘Otherness’ also depends on the
context and the situation. Yet, students also recognized that ‘some others are more
others than others’, and that such a condition is determined by socio-economic
disparities and unequal access to cultural and linguistic resources, all constraints
and inequalities which do not come ‘naturally’ but are instead produced by socio-
cultural and economic factors. The students finally acknowledged that meeting
Otherness through intercultural dialogue is not a practice we can learn from a list
or from a book, as it only begins once we are mutually curious and open toward
the reciprocal Other. We also considered that failure in communication should be
taken into account in discourses on intercultural dialogue as an opportunity to
reconsider causes and contexts from another perspective, to grasp other meanings
and, at the same time, to learn about ourselves too. Indeed, much too often failure
or misunderstanding are considered as the closure of (intercultural) communica-
tion, while they can actually act as their opening, serving the fundamental scope
of mutually redefining assumptions and attitudes taken-for-granted.
4.2 The advantages of a foreign language
The main intent of this and similar activities I have carried out over the years is
to utilize the foreignness that foreign languages foreground to develop students’
critical meta-linguistic awareness on the extent to which linguistic and cultural
features are situated, constructed and (re)produced and, by reflecting and dis-
mantling pre-given assumptions on languages and cultures (one’s own included),
to open up spaces for intercultural encounters. The aim is to favor the growth of
‘critical’ intercultural beings capable of actively engaging in a dialogue that tran-

scends boundaries – real and imagined. … It is in this context that modern/for-
eign language (MFL) education and intercultural communication have emerged
as key disciplines whose convergence has the potential to effectively address this
vision in practice. (Dasli and Díaz 2017: 11)
Moreover, by offering meaningful and contextualized activities, such works are

intended to get students to use the foreign language to communicate and exchange
ideas and opinions. Diverting the target from the ‘English language lesson’ allows
students to feel less judged and more relaxed in using the language, also encourag-
ing the less proficient or more introvert students to participate in the discussion.
The fact that English is a foreign language to all students presents the advantage
that it puts all of them, both native Italian and non-native Italian, in a similar con-
dition of disadvantage,11 a fact which often shuffles roles and further contributes
to problematizing Otherness: indeed, who is the Other when everyone speaks a
language which is Other to all?
5. The critical mandate of foreign language education
The average citizen of Oceania …. is forbidden

the knowledge of foreign languages.
If he were allowed contact with foreigners
he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself.
(George Orwell, 1984)
For all the above reasons, I think that foreign language education has a specific
critical mandate which can be efficaciously supported by Critical Cultural Lin-
guistics. Since Critical Cultural Linguistics combines a focus on languages with
a critical approach to culture(s) and cultural conceptualizations, it can open up
interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on foreign languages and foreign
language education. For example, by working within the word-world gap which
opens between the different languages, foreign language education and Criti-
cal Cultural Linguistics can address critically the cultural conceptualizations and
constructions attributed to each language and culture in order to activate not
only an intercultural discourse but a critical intercultural discourse. Through the
tridimensional lenses of foreign languages, cultures and criticality, foreign lan-
guage education and Critical Cultural Linguistics can foreground the construct
of Otherness as a marker of inequalities in access to socio-linguistic and com-
municative resources, showing how they are (re)produced by language, and how
language and language ideologies contribute to branding individuals and groups.
Such common endeavor is meant to favor a linguistic awareness which can reveal
how cultural conceptualizations are situated and linguistically marked, thus evi-
dencing the socio-political imprint of such constructions, hopefully dismantling
pre-given assumptions on individuals and groups based on cultural conceptual-
izations, and foregrounding the emancipatory and transformational potential of
language.
From very different perspectives, intellectuals, educators and activists such as
Antonio Gramsci, Lorenzo Milani and Paulo Freire have passionately sustained
that linguistic and political stances go together, and that equality between indi-
viduals runs first and foremost through language. Precisely for its approach from
11. Actually, students with immigrant background often perform better at English than their
native Italian peers.
188 Paola Giorgis
the outside, foreign language education can more overtly reveal what lies within
the mechanisms of language which create inequalities and Otherness, in order to
problematize and possibly dismantle them, with the purpose pronounced by one
of Milani’s students: “Era tornato deciso a imparare le lingue a tutto spiano. Molte
lingue male piuttosto che una bene. Pur di poter comunicare con tutti, conoscere
nuova gente e problemi nuovi, e ridere dei sacri confini delle patrie” [‘He had
returned with the intention of learning languages full-scale. Many languages so
and so, rather than one well. In order to be able to communicate with all, meet
new people and new problems, and laugh at the sacred borders of fatherlands.’ ]
(Scuola di Barbiana 2007 [1967]: 21).
Acknowledgements
Few days after the First International Conference of Cultural Linguistics (Prato, Italy, 2016), I
wrote to Farzad Sharifian motivating the reasons why I thought that Cultural Linguistics could
have considered a critical approach, and proposing to him the term Critical Cultural Linguistics
(CCL). He encouraged me to go on with CCL, which I did by writing a Key Concept for the
Center of Intercultural Dialogue (2017) and proposing a strand on CCL at the LAUD Confer-
ence, Landau, Germany (2018).
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What can attitudes reveal about prejudices?
Michael B. Hinner
TU Bergakademie Freiberg
The chapter takes a conceptual approach to prejudices in that it reviews and

applies the relevant research and literature on the subject and related issues.
That is why it first examines the interrelationship of ethnocentrism,
stereotypes, and prejudices in order to show how and why prejudices arise.
It becomes clear from this discussion that the social environment can have
an important and early impact on a person’s predisposition. Another aspect
to consider is identity because a person’s self-image and self-esteem can
determine whether a person is more susceptible to prejudices or not. Next,
the paper examines attitutes and persusion to explain how prejudices can be
overcome. Here as well, it becomes clear why some individuals are swayed
by messages designed to overcome prejudices and others are not. Taking
these factors into consideration, the paper ends with a brief description of
what measures need to be undertaken in oder to overcome prejudices.
Keywords: ethnocentrism, stereotypes, prejudices, identity, attitudes,

persuasion
1. Introduction
This text examines the origins of prejudices in order to understand why and how
they arise in people so as to answer the question of how prejudices could be over-
come, if they are already lodged in a person, or prevented from being formed.
Prejudices are difficult to overcome once they are established within a person, and
simple “one-shot” answers will often not work. A number of factors are responsi-
ble for this tenacity. That is why different strategies have to be pursued in order to
reduce or overcome prejudices.1
1. The information presented in this chapter is an interdisciplinary amalgamation of previous

research. It applies an interdisciplinary approach because specific research and findings in vari-
ous research fields (e.g. communication science, psychology, sociology) offer different perspec-
tives and insights to such a complex topic as prejudice. The text also relies on various theories
because in social sciences established theories have been rigorously tested which means that the
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.103.08hin
192 Michael B. Hinner
The reason for this complexity is found in the origins of prejudices. On the
one hand, certain aspects of human identity make some individuals more sus-
ceptible for prejudices than other people. On the other hand, human percep-
tion makes humans focus on specific information that reinforces prejudices while
ignoring other information that contradicts those prejudices. The social environ-
ment must also be considered because it either fosters or dissuades prejudices.
That is why the present paper first examines ethnocentrism, stereotypes, and prej-
udices in order to understand the origin and nature of prejudices. Ethnocentrism,
i.e. using one’s own culture as the reference point with which other cultures are
then compared (Cooper, Calloway-Thomas & Simonds 2007), can set the stage
for stereotypes, i.e. oversimplifications of other groups which are then transferred
to individuals identified as belonging to that group (DeVito 2015), and make one
susceptible for prejudices, i.e. negative opinions of others (Cooper et al. 2007).
A look at human identity helps explain how and why identity can predispose a
person to be susceptible for prejudices. Since prejudices are essentially negative
attitudes people have about others, an understanding of attitudes and attitudinal
changes, i.e. persuasion, can offer some clues as to what factors need to be consid-
ered in order to overcome prejudices. This chapter is, thus, structured as follows:
Ethnocentrism, stereotypes, and prejudices (Section 2), Identity (Section 3), Atti-
tudes (Section 4), Persuasion (Section 5) and Overcoming ethnocentrism, stereo-
types, and prejudices (Section 6).
2. Ethnocentrism, stereotypes, and prejudices
As people are born into and raised within a specific cultural environment, that
environment helps shape people’s cognition and perception (Brekhus 2015). If
individuals do not come into contact with different cultures, then they are likely
to assume that their culture is the normal standard of how the world functions
and operates (Klopf 1998; Lustig & Koester 2013; Samovar, Porter, McDaniel &
Roy 2013). And when someone encounters a different culture at a later stage, then
that person will compare the new culture and the behavior as well as the commu-
nication of its natives with one’s own culture. Ethnocentrism refers to evaluating
and judging other cultures on basis of one’s own cultural beliefs, values, standards,
and norms. People tend to favor the familiar, and they distrust differences. That
conclusions of those theories are probably able to explain the described phenomena fairly well.
And if it is possible to establish the triangulation of various theories associated with a specific
phenomenon, then this increases the probability that these theories might be on to something.
For a discussion of this topic, see Berger & Chaffee (1987), Bryman (2017) as well as Frey, Botan
& Kreps (2000).
distrust, possibly even fear, of something new and different can lead to antipa-
thy directed at natives of those other cultures (Klopf 1998; Lustig & Koester 2013;
Samovar et al. 2013).
All cultures teach their members “preferred” ways of responding to the world
which are often labeled as “natural” or “appropriate.” Consequently, people
believe that the values of their culture are natural and correct. Culture, thus, pro-
vides a person with a frame of reference with which people can compare objects,
behaviors, customs, etc. of another culture with their own culture. This permits
one to categorize the perceived information (Adler, Rodman & du Pré 2013) which
then allows one to make sense of that information because now one can deter-
mine and identify how similar or different, how close or distant that perceived
information is to something that appears to be comparable or alike in one’s own
culture. Because humans are subjective beings, they typically tend to also judge
that difference (or similarity) either positively or negatively (Adler et al. 2013). As
long as one accepts the cultural standards and norms of one’s own culture, then
one will probably identify oneself with that culture and assume that people from
other cultures who behave and communicate differently than one is acquainted
with in one’s own culture are deviant and not behaving properly (Klopf 1998;
Lustig & Koester 2013; Samovar et al. 2013). If, however, one does not identify one-
self with one’s own culture, then one may isolate oneself within one’s own culture
or seek to find a culture which is more compatible to one’s beliefs, values, and
norms.
A fundamental aspect in understanding ethnocentrism is the concept of in-
groups and out-groups (Klopf 1998; Lustig & Koester 2013; Samovar et al. 2013).
As people develop their cultural identities, they learn to differentiate themselves
from others in different groups; in other words, people differentiate between
in-groups (i.e. those groups and their members with which individuals identify
themselves, to which they belong) and out-groups (i.e. those groups and their
members to which a person does not belong). In-groups provide a person with
a social identity because people typically describe themselves by the groups they
belong to, e.g. the family one was born into, the friends one has, the neighborhood
one lives in, the school and classes one attended, the hobbies and sports one pur-
sues. Out-groups, in contrast, are perceived as different, and their members as
divergent. In line with ethnocentrism, people tend to prefer the known over the
unknown.
The Social Identity Theory of Tajfel and Turner (1986) emphasizes that peo-
ple have a desire to enhance their self-image and to differentiate themselves from
other groups. The desire to achieve a positive social identity results in a posi-
tive bias favoring the in-group (Tajfel & Turner 1986). This should not come as
a surprise because ethnocentrism tends to favor the familiar as well. Studies have
shown that the greater the individual’s in-group identification, the more likely
these individuals are to discriminate in favor of the in-group (Gagnon & Bourhis
1996; Perreault & Bourhis 1998). In addition to in-group preference, individuals
tend to engage in social competition to preserve a positive social identity when
interacting with members of out-groups (Turner 1975). However, when someone
cannot identify herself/himself with her/his own group, then that person can pro-
ject positive characteristics onto the out-group (Tajfel & Turner 1986).
According to the Social Identity Theory, if one identifies oneself with an in-
group, then it is likely that one will project negative associations onto the respec-
tive out-group(s) (Gagnon & Bourhis 1996; Perreault & Bourhis 1998; Tajfel &
Turner 1986). Very often these projections are stereotypes. Stereotypes are fixed
impression of a group of people through which we then perceive specific indi-
viduals (DeVito 2015; Rubin & Badea 2012; Stangor & Schaller 1996). Cooper
et al. (2007) point out that the simplifications associated with stereotypes permit
people help reduce the complexity of the world which in turn permits people to
understand this complexity. By reducing the complexity to specific categories, it
is easier to manage and, thus, respond to this complexity through cognitive and
behavioral adjustment. “Stereotypes can be individual or social” (Cooper et al.
2007: 50), which means that they are directed at individual people identified as
belonging to a specific out-group as well as against the out-group itself. Cooper
et al. (2007: 50) also point out that stereotypes “serve as self-fulling prophecies –
the tendency to see behavior that confirms our expectations, even when the
behavior is absent.”
Because these stereotypes are oversimplifications, regardless of whether those
oversimplifications are right or wrong, they are often associated with judgements.
That is why stereotypes can lead to prejudices (Cooper et al. 2007) because both
tend to become established before actually meeting a member of the other culture.
It is these pre-established views which then influence the actual encounter with a
member of that other culture and the perception of that encounter as well as that
culture, i.e. a self-fulfilling prophecy2 (Cooper et al. 2007). And once an opinion
is established within a person, it takes time and effort to overcome them (Devine
1989).
2. A self-fulfilling prophecy refers to the expectations people have of a particular outcome that
are based on specific assumptions of these people. These people will then typically act upon
on those assumptions and ignore other information that might contradict those assumptions.
When these people achieve that anticipated outcome, their expectations will have been fulfilled.
This is accomplished because they will have undertaken actions and measures (usually without
being consciously aware that they are doing so) that led towards that outcome (Adler et al. 2013;
Gamble & Gamble 2012).
Interestingly, stereotypes that are based on secondhand opinions, i.e. stereo-

types derived from the opinions of others or from the media, tend to be:
– More extreme
– Less variable from one person to another
– More uniformly applied to others
– More resistant to change
than stereotypes based on direct personal experiences and interactions because it
is easier to project assumptions onto those who are unknown to one (Thompson,
Judd, & Park 2000; Yzerbyt, Coull & Rocher 1999). If, however, one has interacted
with a person from another culture, then that other culture will not be entirely
anonymous and one will probably project the experience with that other person
onto the entire group. On the other hand, if one has already accepted specific
stereotypes about another group, then subsequent encounters with individuals
from that stereotyped group who deviate from one’s expectations based on one’s
stereotypes will be considered exceptions or as being atypical of that group
(Lustig & Koester 2013).
When rejection of an out-group member carries emotional reactions such
as anger, disgust, and a desire to avoid contact, it is called prejudice. According
to Cooper et al. (2007: 52), “prejudice consist of negative attitudes toward others
based on faulty and inflexible stereotypes”; hence, a link is established between
stereotypes and prejudices. These feelings may be overt or covert, and they are
directed either at a group of people or at an individual who is identified as a
member of that group (Klopf 1998). Allport (1954) points out that people ignore
information that contradicts their prejudices while at the same time these people
attempt to distort contradictory information to such an extent that it supports
their prejudices.
According to Van Dijk (1987), prejudices tend to be group based and the
result of communicating with in-group members. Stereotypes and prejudices are
used to describe out-group members. Prejudices fulfill the function of confirm-
ing the superiority of one’s own in-group over out-groups and, thus, also satisfy
specific social functions by reinforcing the in-group solidarity by highlighting the
dominance of one’s in-group over others and by making the others appear less
worthy than the in-group members. By discriminating in favor of one’s in-group
and discriminating against out-group members, prejudices reinforce the idea that
one’s own beliefs, values, and norms are right and correct while those of others
are wrong (i.e. practicing ethnocentrism). In fact, people with prejudices often
develop those negative attitudes towards others because they feel threatened by
those others in some manner, regardless of whether that is actually the case or
merely imagined.
From the above discussion, it becomes apparent that prejudices need to be

examined from various perspectives, i.e. the actual individual perspective and the
social perspective. People usually identify themselves with specific in-groups and
their views including negative opinions directed at out-group members as the
Social Identity Theory postulates. In other words, indviduals who identify them-
selves with an in-group will also assume the attitudes and prejudices prevalent
among the in-group members. This means that a child, growing up in a family
in which various family members hold prejudices towards certain out-groups and
that child identifes herself/himself with those family members, then that child
will probably also internalize those prejudices. And if the social peers of that child
hold similar prejudices towards those out-groups, then this social environment
will reinforce those prejudices in the child. That is why prejudices can be formed
early in life as a person develops her or his identity (Chen & Starosta 1998; Klopf
1998; Samovar et al. 2013). At the same time, though, individuals have to be sus-
ceptible to such messages and peer pressure which is why also human identity will
have to be examined in order to understand why some individuals are more prone
to such opinions and behavior than others even though they grew up in the same
cultural environment.
3. Identity
When taking a closer look at identity, it becomes apparent that it is a social con-
struct. People have certain perceptions of themselves that help define their iden-
tity. These perceptions include one’s own assumptions of oneself, the opinions
others have of oneself and their interaction with oneself based on those opinions
as well as the assumed opinions of others that one believes others hold of one-
self (Adler et al. 2013). The latter assumptions could in fact be quite different from
what the others actually believe; nonetheless, such faulty assumptions can and do
influence one’s interaction with others.
Identity is not assigned or concrete; identity is created, reflected, and main-
tained through interactions with people. It is, thus, a social construct (Collier &
Thomas 1988; Combs & Snygg 1959; Piaget 1954; Yep 1998). Even though a person
undergoes constant change, once identity is in place, it is relatively stable and dif-
ficult to alter (Keltikangas 1990). Identity is essentially how individuals perceive
themselves, i.e. self-concept or self-perception. It consists of self-image and self-
esteem (Adler et al. 2013; Gamble & Gamble 2012). Self-image refers to how indi-
viduals see themselves; it can be positive or negative. Those individuals who have
a positive self-image tend to have high self-worth, be open-minded, and have a
positive other evaluation. In contrast, individuals with a negative self-image tend
to have poor self-worth, be susceptible to stereotypes and prejudices while also

having a negative other evaluation (Adler et al. 2013; Gamble & Gamble 2012).
It can, thus, be clearly seen that a person’s self-image is reflected in that person’s
opinions and behavior towards others. This means that individuals with a nega-
tive self-image will not only evaluate others negatively, but they will also harbor
stereotypes and prejudices towards others in part due to their poor self-worth.
People tend to blame their own shortcomings on others (Adler et al. 2013; Gamble
& Gamble 2012).
Self-esteem refers to how much one likes oneself; it can be classified as either
high or low. Those individuals with high self-esteem are more willing to com-
municate with others, think highly of others, are not afraid of the reactions and
comments of others (even those comments referring to oneself ), and are able to
defend their own position in a dialogue with others. Individuals with low self-
esteem, in contrast, are critical of others and themselves. They are also distrustful
of others, dislike others, feel threatened by them, and they have problems defend-
ing themselves. High or low self-esteem, thus, reinforces a positive or negative
self-image.
Another important aspect of identity is self- and other-awareness (Rochat
2003). Through the gradual interaction with one’s social environment, a person
undergoes various stages of self-awareness that can include other-awareness
(Rochat 2003: 720–722); namely:
Level 0: Confusion, i.e. no self-awareness
Level 1: Differentiation, i.e. one is able to sense that what is perceived in mirror
is different from what is perceived in the surrounding environment
Level 2: Situation, i.e. one shows the first signs of a contemplative stance
towards the specular image
Level 3: Identification, i.e. an identified self is expressed
Level 4: Permanence, i.e. the self is identified beyond the here and now
Level 5: Self-Consciousness or “meta” self-awareness, i.e. the self is recognized
from a first person as well as a third person’s perspective
It should be noted, though, that not everyone reaches Level 5 (Rochat 2003).
Identity, thus, influences how people communicate, i.e. how they create and
interpret messages (Doise 1986). For successful interpersonal communication,
a person needs self- and other-awareness (i.e. be a high self-monitor) because
one needs to be aware of how one’s message is received by others so that one
could adjust one’s subsequent messages on the basis of how one’s counterpart
reacts (Adler et al. 2013). This permits one to adjust one’s own communication
and behavior to that of one’s counterpart, i.e. as postulated by the Johari Window.3
The Johari Window describes the relationship of self-disclosure, self-awareness,
and other-awareness (Adler et al. 2013). The Johari Window postulates that self-
disclosure is important for relationships because it helps foster trust (i.e. the abil-
ity to predict the communication and behavior of one’s counterpart to the point
that one assumes one’s counterpart will not use the conveyed information against
one). Self-awareness, along with other-awareness, is also important in building
positive relationships because it causes one to critically assess one’s own com-
munication and behavior with regard to how it affects one’s counterpart (i.e.
metacognition). With sufficient knowledge of and familiarity with another per-
son, one is able to anticipate how that person would react to specific messages;
hence, allowing one to adjust and “customize” one’s messages to that specific
individual (i.e. social metacognition). High self-monitors have that ability (Adler
et al. 2013; Gamble & Gamble 2012; Hamachek 1992). Low self-monitors, in con-
trast, express what they are thinking and feeling without giving much attention
to the impression their communication and behavior creates (Snyder 1987). Low
self-monitors with low self-awareness overestimate their own abilities and cannot
objectively evaluate their (in)abilities – this is the so-called Dunning-Kruger
effect (Dunning & Kruger 1999). According to the research of Dunning and
Kruger, this deficit can be overcome by improving the metacognitive competence
of those individuals. It may also play a crucial role in overcoming prejudices.
It seems that all humans have a need for an identity that is secure, included,
predictable, connected to others, and consistent (Adler et al. 2013; DeVito 2015;
Gamble & Gamble 2012). But if one interacts with people from another culture,
that identity can be threatened because such encounters are often unpredictable
(Gudykunst 1988; Lustig & Koester 2013; Samovar et al. 2013). These intercultural
encounters are unpredictable because different cultures can use different verbal
and nonverbal cues which makes communication less predictable. Many people
often feel threatened by unpredictable situations and try to avoid them (Berger
& Calabrese 1975; Gudykunst 1988; Lustig & Koester 2013; Samovar et al. 2013).
Unfortunately, as noted above, fear of the unknown can lead to prejudices
(Pettigrew & Tropp 2008).
From the above discussion of identity, it becomes apparent that a person’s self-
image, self-esteem as well as self- and other awareness can make an individual
susceptible to stereotypes and prejudice. This is an important insight. Fortunately,
the research of Dunning and Kruger indicates that offering training in metacog-
nitive skills can be helpful in overcoming stereotypes and prejudices. Helpful in
3. The term Johari is a blend of the first names of the psychologists who created this technique
in 1955, i.e. Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham.
overcoming prejudices is also an understanding of attitudes because prejudices

are negative attitudes as pointed out above (Cooper et al. 2007).
4. Attitudes
Attitudes are psychological tendencies that are expressed by evaluating a particu-

lar entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken 1993). This can
include people and groups of people. Attitudes encompass the judgments indi-
viduals develop and the evaluative representation of those judgments in memory
(Fazio 1986). Attitudes consist of a cognitive, affective, and behavioral component
(Breckler 1984). The cognitive component refers to the beliefs and attributes a
person associates with the person or entity in question. The affective component
refers to the emotions a person associates with the person or entity in question.
And the behavioral component refers to how that cognition and those emotions
influence a person’s behavior towards that person or entity (Breckler 1984). Atti-
tudes occur within individuals and within interpersonal contexts. That is why
they are part of one’s identity because identity is a social construct as noted above
(Adler et al. 2013).
Attitudes are learned, refer to the feelings and beliefs of an individual or
a group of people. These feelings and beliefs define a person’s predispositions
towards given aspects of the world. Attitudes can fall in any direction, and they
are organized within a person’s established knowledge structures to help explain
a person’s perception of the world. According to Albarracin, Johnson and Zanna
(2005), attitudes are judgments influenced by external information, the memory
of past judgments, prior knowledge, and new judgments which can also be stored
in memory. This means that attitudes include an individual and a social compo-
nent. That is why attitude change involves influencing not just the individual, but
also that individual’s social environment – a notion that the Social Identity The-
ory postulates as noted above. This also means that an examination of persuasion
could be helpful in understanding how such an attitudinal change is initiated.
5. Persuasion
According to Ajzen’s and Fishbein’s (1980) Theory of Reasoned Action, behavior

results in part from intentions which are a complex outcome of attitudes. The the-
ory postulates that a person’s intention to behave in a certain way is determined
by that person’s attitude towards the behavior and a set of beliefs about how other
people would like one to behave (i.e. identity). Each factor – a person’s own atti-
tude and the opinions of others – is weighted according to its importance. Some-
times, a person’s own attitude is important, sometimes the opinions of others are
more important, and sometimes they are more or less equal in weight. The the-
ory, thus, shows how influential the social environment is with regard to attitudes.
Attitudes are influenced through socialization, experience, and personal identity
as noted above. Social interaction with other people, family members, friends,
colleagues, etc. can teach a person to feel favorably or unfavorably towards specific
people or entities around oneself (i.e. the Social Identity Theory). The actual and
perceived experiences of a person influence that person’s judgment along with the
opinion of others who are important to that person.
Attitudes can change as a result of persuasive communication (Adler et al.
2013). But a number of other factors need to be considered as well for persuasive
communication to be effective because the message itself may not suffice. Accord-
ing to the Social Judgement Theory, people evaluate messages based on their
anchors (Sherif & Hovland 1961). Anchors are personal reference points that are
the attitudes people have on a particular topic. People’s attitudes can be placed
into three categories; namely, the latitude of acceptance, the latitude of rejection,
and the latitude of non-commitment (Sherif & Hovland 1961). People tend to
respond to messages that fall within their latitude of acceptance whereas people
do not respond to messages that fall within their latitude of rejection (Adler et al.
2013). People who have a very strong attitude on a topic will have a narrow attitude
of non-commitment while people who care less strongly have a wider attitude of
non-commitment (Dainton & Zelley 2015). People’s reactions to persuasive mes-
sages, thus, depend on the position they assume on the topic in question (Sherif
& Hovland 1961). This means that people with strong attitudes will not be swayed
by messages designed to change people’s opinion in a particular direction if that
direction does not conform to one’s attitudes. That is why mapping people’s atti-
tudes can be helpful in determining if and what messages might sway people’s
stereotypes and prejudices. According to O’Keefe (2002), messages that fall within
the latitude of acceptance will be viewed positively (assimilation effect) and mes-
sages that fall within the latitude of rejection will be viewed negatively (contrast
effect).
When a message falls within the latitude of rejection, the contrast effect kicks
in. The contrast effect makes a message appear to be farther away from a person’s
anchor than it really is, i.e. that person subconsciously exaggerates the difference
between the message’s position and the person’s own position (O’Keefe 2002). The
assimilation effect is the opposite, i.e. when a messages falls within the latitude of
acceptance, the person subconsciously minimizes the difference between the mes-
sage’s position and the person’s position (O’Keefe 2002). The message, thus, rein-
forces what the person already believes, i.e. selective perception. According to the
Social Judgment Theory, attitudes can only be changed if messages are within the
latitude of acceptance or on the edge of the latitude of non-commitment (leaning
towards acceptance) (Dainton & Zelley 2015). This information needs to be kept
in mind when formulating messages designed to change people’s prejudices.
According to the Selective Exposure Theory, people tend to look for informa-
tion that confirms and reinforces existing views while ignoring information that
contradicts their viewpoints (Hart et al. 2009; Sullivan 2009; Kastenmüller et al.
2010). It will be recalled that Allport (1954) notes that people ignore information
that contradicts their prejudices while at the same time they try to distort con-
tradictory information to such an extent that it fits into and supports their preju-
dices. When coming across new information, people focus on those parts which
make sense within the framework of their own attitudes (Jonas et al. 2001). The
Social Judgement Theory comes to a similar conclusion. When people are con-
fronted with information they do not like, they either do not perceive it or make it
fit their existing attitudes, i.e. they rationalize as Allport (1954) postulates. In fact,
people forget information that contradicts their existing attitudes (Klapper 1960).
Klapper (1960) notes that group norms are mediators and reinforce attitudes.
In-group norms create a predisposition toward specific attitudes. This is also pos-
tulated by the Social Identity Theory, and the Theory of Reasoned Action notes
that in some instances the opinions of one’s peers can sway one to accept their
views and opinions. Such behavior leads to increased exposure of information that
confirms and reaffirms existing attitudes which in turn fuels selective exposure.
The Social Information Processing Framework postulates that individuals are
motivated to reduce uncertainty and to assimilate with their immediate social
environment (Salancik & Pfeffer 1978). That is why individuals rely on existing
schemata based on previous experiences with a current understanding of the task
at hand and integrate social information collected from their peers into a gen-
eral interpretation. Consequently, socially constructed realities are mediated by
socially relevant others. These peers serve to filter information and channel the
expectations of the larger social environment onto individuals (Salancik & Pfeffer
1978). Thus, individual attitudes are socially developed because individuals make
sense of their behavior in response to the norms and expectations of their peers.
The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger 1957) states that people expe-
rience mental discomfort when they are confronted with contradictory and con-
flicting information (e.g. a message that contradicts a formed prejudice). The
difference between one’s attitude and behavior creates a tension that is only
resolved by altering either one’s attitude or one’s behavior. When people are con-
fronted with new or unfamiliar messages, people use existing cognitive structures
(i.e. frames) to process the new information. For people to understand this new
information, they have to find frames with which they can link the new informa-
tion to existing information. Whenever the new information is inconsistent with

previously held attitudes, then people will experience dissonance (Festinger 1957).
The theory postulates that people usually seek to minimize this discomfort.
According to Festinger (1957), three relationships exist between beliefs/atti-
tudes and behavior:
– Irrelevance, i.e. when the new message and existing attitudes are perceived as
unrelated
– Consonance, i.e. when the new message and existing attitudes are perceived as
congruent
– Dissonance, i.e. when the new message contradicts existing attitudes
Festinger (1957) argues that people prefer consonance. Dissonance exists until
people can rationalize the new message either by changing their attitudes or their
behavior. The more a person can justify contrasting attitudes and behavior, the
less discomfort that person feels. This is similar to what the Social Judgement The-
ory proposes as noted above. In other words, if one’s social environment (or in-
group) favors a particular attitude, then one will also accept that attitude because
it is part of one’s social identity.
The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance further postulates that people selec-
tively perceive various stimuli in order to minimize their dissonance. With selec-
tive exposure, a person actively avoids information that is inconsistent with
previously established attitudes. And with selective attention, a person will only
focus on information that reaffirms that person’s attitudes and disregard any infor-
mation that does not support those attitudes. A person subsequently decodes
ambiguous information with selective interpretation in such a way that it is con-
sistent with established attitudes. And with selective retention, a person stores
only that information which upholds existing attitudes while dismissing or for-
getting information that creates dissonance. This is similar to what the Selective
Exposure Theory states as mentioned above.
People often attempt to persuade themselves that the decision they reached
was correct (Gass & Seiter 2014). This might open the possibility of changing peo-
ple’s attitudes by offering a solution to the inconsistency between the new mes-
sage and existing attitudes. By presenting an easy solution for the inconsistency, it
is possible to minimize a person’s dissonance and discomfort. By offering a solu-
tion or a course of action that bridges the gap between inconsistent attitudes, mes-
sages may influence people to use these methods to create cognitive consonance.
A notion that is also echoed by the Social Judgement Theory. This means that
messages designed to overcome prejudices need to fall at best within the latitude
of acceptance or at least with the latitude of non-commitment as noted above so
that the messages are not rejected outright. Consequently, it is important that the
encoder of those messages is familiar with the intended receiver of those messages
so as to formulate messages in such a way that they are ideally within the receiver’s
latitude of acceptance. This may be accomplished by using a questionnaire prior
to encoding the message so that it can be adjusted to fit into the receiver’s latitude
of acceptance (Sherif & Hovland 1961).
However, people are often resistant to change as the Theory of Psychological
Reactance postulates (Brehm 1966). People’s desire to resist change occurs when
people wish to remain in control over the way they think and act. This need to
be in control and the desire for a stable and balanced life provide the foundation
for reactance. This implies that provisions must be made for reducing that resis-
tance. When seeking to reduce resistance, it is important to understand whether
the resistance is constructive or not – from the resister’s perspective. If resistance
is perceived as constructive, persuasion might be difficult or impossible because
constructive resistance is often based on deeply held attitudes. A conclusion that
is also forwarded by the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
Kelman (1961) conducted extensive research on persuasion and concluded
that people accept a change for the following three reasons:
– Compliance, i.e. publically accepting an appeal, but privately refusing to
accept the change
– Identification, i.e. accepting an appeal to gain satisfaction in being liked by
those one admires who themselves have accepted the appeal
– Internalization, i.e. accepting an appeal which also entails accepting a change
in one’s attitudes
While compliance will not change attitudes and actually lead to reactance, identi-
fication can produce a change if the resultant change not only maintains the rela-
tionship with the ones one admires, but actually intensifies it. This is what the
Theory of Reasoned Action and the Social Identity Theory indicate as well. Inter-
nalization is difficult to achieve because people must have an incentive to change.
And if no incentive exists, then the person in question will not change her/his atti-
tudes. Internalization often includes rationalizing the change so that the change
fits into the person’s existing system of attitudes. In other words, the change must
be perceived as being consistent with the person’s convictions of what is impor-
tant in life. But this rationalization varies from person to person.
According to Albarracin (2004), individuals with higher self-confidence, i.e. a
positive self-image and high self-esteem, are less prone to be affected by selective
exposure. In fact, people with higher self-confidence are more likely to look at
information that is both consistent and inconsistent with their viewpoints. This
means that individuals with a positive self-image and high self-esteem are more
likely to accept an appeal and possibly internalize it even though it does not fit
into their latitude of acceptance as long as the reasoning is perceived as logical.

On the other hand, individuals with a negative self-image and low self-esteem
will be less likely to yield to such appeals as noted above. However, Dunning and
Kruger (1999) have revealed that metacognitive training could lead to accepting
these appeals that would otherwise be rejected or ignored.
6. Overcoming ethnocentrism, stereotypes, and prejudices
It is generally assumed that personal contact and education can help reduce the
negative effects of ethnocentrism as well as stereotypes and prejudices (Samovar
et al. 2013). It will be recalled that secondhand opinions are more difficult to over-
come and often also more extreme than opinions based on firsthand experiences.
However, this personal contact has to be a positive experience (Pettigrew & Trapp
2008) and should involve cooperation within a joint project that seeks to achieve
a common goal if the stereotypes and prejudices are to be overcome, e.g. working
together on a task or playing together in a football team.
But Lustig and Koester (2013) caution that not all intercultural encounters
result in a reduction of stereotypes and prejudices (Lustig & Koester 2013). For
intercultural encounters to be successful, there has to be (Lustig & Koester 2013):
– Support from the top, i.e. high-status persons need to support the contact
– Participants need to have a personal stake in the encounter, i.e. they need to
have a perceived gain
– Positive experience, i.e. the encounter has to be pleasing so as to encourage
further contacts
– Positive outcome, i.e. both parties ought to either strive for a common goal
and/or the interaction ought to result in realizing individual goals
In other words, the social environment is important in eliciting a change in
stereotypes and prejudices as is the individual in question. This is confirmed by
the Social Identity Theory and the Theory of Reasoned Action as well as the
Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, the Theory of Psychological Reactance and the
research of Kelman as noted above.
When it comes to education, two types of educational programs seem to be
helpful (Samovar et al. 2013):
– Multicultural education curricula, i.e. the various practices and traditions of
different ethnic groups presented from the minority group’s perspective
– Cultural diversity training, i.e. teaching the value of diversity to raise aware-
ness of the differences, how to deal with this diversity, and to recognize the
benefits of diversity
Education and contact need to reduce or disarm perceived threats because if fun-
damental aspects of a person’s (cultural) identity appear to be threatened, then
that person might become more ethnocentric (Lustig & Koester 2013). If per-
sonal encounters result in the other person being perceived as atypical of her/his
culture, then this will not reduce stereotypes and prejudices because that other
person will be perceived as being unique and different from “the rest” for whom
the stereotypes and prejudices still apply (Lustig & Koester 2013) as also pointed
out above.
A study conducted by the Faculty of Education at the University of Hamburg
revealed that French and German pupils actually intensified their stereotypes
after having been together a in summer camp. A test before and after the summer
camp revealed a more positive self-image and a more negative image of the other
group at the end of the summer camp (Wahl 2000). It was concluded that stereo-
types block out new experiences and only admit those experiences which rein-
force existing assumptions as noted above with the Selective Exposure Theory.
During the study it was realized that short-term exposure to another environ-
ment or a brief contact with members of the out-group do not change stereo-
types or prejudices (Wahl 2000). Instead, individuals need to learn that other
cultures are different, but neither better nor worse than members of one’s in-
group (Wahl 2000).
A study by Dong, Day and Collaco (2008) shows that ethnocentrism leads
to intolerance because ethnocentrism does not accept cultural diversity. This,
in turn, leads to negative stereotypes, prejudices, and negative behavior towards
out-group members. According to Chen and Starosta (2000), intercultural com-
munication sensitivity increases intercultural communication competence which
helps reduce ethnocentrism and such ancillary negative aspects as stereotypes
and prejudices. Cultural awareness is the foundation for intercultural communi-
cation sensitivity. The more experience one has with cultural difference, the more
competent one is in intercultural situations and the less likely one is to rely on
stereotypes and prejudices (Dong et al. 2008). A study conducted by Greenholtz
(2000) indicates that proficiency in foreign languages tends to increase intercul-
tural communication competence as well because foreign language proficiency
usually goes hand-in-hand with cultural awareness. After all, in order to be pro-
ficient in another language, one has to also understand something of the people
who use that language as their native tongue. Proficiency in another language also
usually entails the ability to critically assess one’s use of that language, i.e. apply-
ing metacognition. Those who are truly proficient in another language, are usu-
ally able to predict how their messages will be perceived by native speakers of
that language, i.e. being able to apply social metacognition. With proficiency (and
metacognition) one could overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect and counter the
impact of a negative self-image and low self-esteem. But that would only be pos-
sible if a person with a negative self-image and low self-esteem were to achieve
proficiency in another language.
Dong et al. (2008) conclude that people need to interact with members of
another culture in order to increase their intercultural communication compe-
tence. Within an organizational context, Likert (1967) proposed the linking-pin
function to overcome competition and hostility between various intra-
organizational groups. The linking-pin function connects different groups within
an organization by having members of different groups working together on var-
ious committees. A similar concept has been proposed for overcoming stereo-
types and prejudices (Lin 2002; Thomas 2006). The linking pin concept is
designed to create new frames of reference that go beyond those of one’s ethno-
centric perception.
7. Conclusion
From the above discussion, it becomes apparent that overcoming prejudices is not
an easy, “one-shot” process because several factors need to be considered. On the
one hand, it ought to have become apparent that the susceptibility for prejudices
is also found in our identity. Some people are more prone to accept prejudices
than other people. And on the other hand, the social environment plays an impor-
tant role as well. This means that at minimum a two-prong strategy is needed
to overcome prejudices; namely, one strategy that focuses on the individual and
another strategy that is directed at society. Education might be the best tool to
accomplish both because metacognitive training can be helpful in overcoming the
personal motivation to form and maintain prejudices. At the same time, educating
society at large could also counter ethnocentric thinking and behavior because
the social component is also important in overcoming prejudices as suggested
by the Theory of Reasoned Action. This might be best accomplished by mak-
ing foreign language instruction along with multicultural education and diversity
training required subjects in school as early as possible. And if it is possible to
integrate pupils of diverse cultural background into the active multicultural edu-
cation and diversity training sessions, then such integration could function as a
linking pin (Likert 1967; Lin 2002; Thomas 2006) to help reduce ethnocentrism,
faulty stereotypes, and prejudices. But this has to be done early in life because
children start learning and forming stereotypes and prejudices at an early age
(Chen & Starosta 1998; Klopf 1998; Samovar et al. 2013). However, it is impera-
tive that the messages presented in such courses and training sessions fall ideally
within the latitude of acceptance so that they will actually be considered by the
individuals (i.e. Social Judgement Theory). Otherwise, such messages would be
for naught as several theories postulate.
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Index
A Critical Discourse Analysis hyponymy 129–131, 137

Ælfric 149, 151, 153–154 (CDA) 2–3, 6–7, 54, 58
animal metaphor 71, 73, 81, 83, cultural conceptualisations 6–8, I
108, 112–113, 123–124 106–108, 110, 113, 124, 127–128, ideology 2, 5–7, 72–73, 113, 175,
asceticism 152–153, 161 172–174, 181, 187–188 178–179
cultural diversity training 205 identity 179, 184, 192–194,
B 196–205
Bede 150 D image schema 38, 155
Bible, reference to 83, 117–118 detoxing 147–148, 154, 159–161, incompatibility, semantic 129,
blending 54, 57, 59–61, 63, 67, 87, 162, 165 131–132, 135, 137
91–92 Dunning-Krueger effect 198, 206 integrative medicine 154, 156
body politic metaphor 19, 24 in-group 56, 59–60, 68, 72–75,
body scenario 21–22, 24–25, E 78, 84, 87, 91, 93, 171, 183,
26–27, 31 election as a job interview 193–196, 201
body-part scenario 21–27, 31 metaphor 37, 44–45 invariance principle 17
Brexit 52, 55, 73, 77–78, 94 election as a lawsuit invasion scenario 53, 56, 66, 68,
metaphor 37, 44 70–71, 81, 83–84, 93, 176
C embodiment 17, 106
Cameron, David 64–65, 74–75, emotion concepts 130–131 J
88 English as a Lingua Franca 181 Johari Window 198
Christianity 116, 123, 153–154 entailment 108, 123 journey metaphor 46–48,
circles of English 111 entrenchment 6, 60, 62, 69, 87, 151–152, 160, 163, 166–167
clean eating 157, 159, 161–165 ethnocentrism 192–195, 204–206
Clinton, Hillary 37, 43–46, 48 M
collocations 21, 89, 90, 130, F mapping 32, 38–40, 44, 59, 61,
134–135, 143 fasting 151, 153–154, 161 66, 69, 90, 94
corpora flaming 56 Merkel, Angela 77–78, 86
ICE (International Corpus foreign language education 172, (meta-)linguistic awareness
of English) 109, 111–113 178–179, 181–182, 187–188 186–187
COCA (Corpus of framing 2, 18, 75, 93, 184 metaphor, classification of
Contemporary American conventionalised metaphor
English) 38 G 57–58, 60, 68, 70, 76, 82,
GloWbE (Corpus of Global gate keeping 55–56 87, 93–94
Web-based English) geo-body scenario 21–22, 24, creative metaphor 17–18, 38,
109–122 27–28, 31–32 43, 48–49, 92
Cognitive Dissonance 201–204 Ghanaian English 109–111, 114, deliberate metaphor 37,
Cognitive Sociolinguistics 5, 106, 116, 121, 123 41–42, 50, 57, 66, 76
108 globalisation 180 direct metaphor 43, 49
componential analysis 128–133, great chain of being mixed metaphor 40–41, 57,
135, 137 metaphor 6–7, 71–72, 113–114, 65–66, 68, 80–87, 94
compound/compounding 38, 123 novel metaphor 38, 43, 45,
66, 86, 139–144 48–49, 59–60, 66, 76, 94
Conceptual Metaphor Theory H political metaphor 17, 19, 37
(CMT) 2, 17–19, 36, 106, 109 highlighting and hiding 2, 25, 50, purposeful metaphor 37,
corruption, conceptualisation of 91, 95 41–50
8, 121–122, 124 hyperbole 18, 84–85, 94 metaphor chaining 81
212 Cultural Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies
metaphor continuation nurturant parent model 19 simile 20, 43–45, 49

strategies 87–88, 92, 94 Social Identity Theory 193–196,
metaphor identification O 199–204
procedure (MIP, MIPVU) 48, Obama, Barack 37, 40, 45–50 Social Information Processing
66, 110, 112 OED (Oxford English Framework 201
metaphor scenario 21–24, 26–28, Dictionary) 118, 150–152 Social Judgement Theory
31–32, 55, 59, 62, 64, 70–71, 74, Old English 149–151, 167 200–203, 207
77, 79, 84, 87–88, 90, 94 onomasiological metaphor spiritual beings 113
metaphor-topoi correlation 63, analysis 37, 42, 49–50 spiritual health 149, 151–153,
65, 70, 72, 79 out-group 54, 57, 59–60, 70, 72, 160–163, 166–167
metaphor variation 16–17, 19, 74, 78, 87, 171, 183, 193–196, 205 stereotype 30–31, 54, 59, 181–185,
106–108 otherness, and othering 75, 192–200, 204–207
metaphorical model 38–41, 171–172, 179, 181, 183–188 strict father model 19
44–48
migration and migrants 53–96, P T
175–176 periphrastic expressions 128, 139, TESOL 180
mimetic expressions 140–142, 144 Theory of Psychological
144 person scenario 22, 24, 27–28 Reactance 203–4
mind/body dualism 150 prejudice 58–59, 183, 191–192, Theory of Reasoned Action
motion verbs 69, 128, 139, 194–202, 204–207 199–201, 203–204, 206
142–143 proverb 108, 115–116, 121–122, 124 topos 54, 59, 63, 65–74, 79, 84, 87,
multicultural education 204, 206 pseudoscience 154–155 91–92, 95
Trump, Donald 37, 43–46, 48, 77
N R
natural disaster scenario 56, risk society 147, 163–165 U
59–60, 62, 67–71, 75–76, 81, UKIP 53, 73
83–84, 87, 93 S Ukraine war 178
naturopathy 154–155, 160, Selective Exposure Theory unidirectionality, of mapping 61,
164–166 201–203, 205 87
Nazism 6, 30–31, 71, 73, 174, 177, self-/other-awareness 197–198,
179 205 W
Nigerian English 107, 109–111, self-esteem 197–198, 203–204 World Englishes 106–108
114–116, 118, 120–121, 123–124 self-image 193, 196–197, 203–206
The present volume explores the meeting ground between Critical
Discourse Studies and Cultural Linguistics. The contributions
investigate culture-specific conceptualisations, ways of framing
and conceptual metaphors in political discourse, as well as cultural
models, cultural stereotypes and stereotyping. The individual
authors use quantitative (e.g. corpus-based approaches) and/or
qualitative methods. They address a range of contexts, e.g. Europe,
the US, Japan, West Africa, and a variety of topics, e.g. migration,
presidential elections, identity, food culture, concepts of health.
The papers included in this volume show that ideologies, the key
concern of Critical Discourse Studies, cannot be analysed
independently of cultural conceptualisations. In a complementary,
dialectic fashion, cultural conceptualisation, the central concern
of Cultural Linguistics, have ideological implications, sometimes
subtle, sometimes very straightforward. The present volume thus
illustrates that travelling on this meeting ground is a natural and
fruitful endeavour for both approaches.
isbn 978 90 272 1405 8
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politics, society and culture

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

John Benjamins Publishing Company

the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence

© 2023 – John Benjamins B.V.

1. Critical (cognitive) Discourse Studies and Cultural Linguistics:

The first comprehensive handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts &

in or related to Cognitive Linguistics (CL), and they contributed much to the

A comprehensive theoretical foundation for Cultural Linguistics was first laid

These background structures, however, are not in themselves ideological.

3. Contributions to the volume

compares the above-mentioned metaphors employed by Trump and Clinton to

Penelope Scott analyses the current discourse on “clean eating” from a

One of the key-metaphor complexes in conceptualizing national identity is

Keywords: conceptual metaphor, culture, pragmatics, variation, universal

(2) […] like Frankenstein [i.e.: Frankenstein’s monster], we have an abnormal

These ‘personalized’ descriptions of the nation are remarkable in various respects,

2. The ubiquity of metaphor variation

“the contemporary theory of metaphor”, G. Lakoff laid down an “invariance prin-

3. Variation in metaphor corpora

Political metaphor variation serves to define ideologies as well as political group-

3.1 The English L1 sample

Table 1. Scenario distribution: English L1

3.2 The German L1 sample

Among the European non-English L1 samples, the German L1 sample is the

Table 2. Scenario distribution: German L1

The heart concept is used predominantly to refer to the people/population or its

grating implications. Likewise, the stomach or belly is positively connoted as

The geobody scenario plays a significantly smaller role in the German

The second perspective, which is exclusive to the German cohort, is an economic-

The reference to a German “heartland” in the last example implies a problemati-

The student writers in their early or mid-twenties convey a critical-but-

As the reference to current right-wing extremist movements such as Pegida shows,

Overall, English and German L1 speakers’ conceptualizations of their nation(s)

a hierarchically ordered anatomy and functional interdependence among the dif-

In this chapter I have shown that conceptual variation in response to a metaphor

Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis.

Sharifian, Farzad (2010). Cultural conceptualizations in intercultural communication: A study

This contribution investigates the metaphorical conceptualisation of US-

Keywords: purposeful/deliberate metaphor, political discourse,

by conceptual metaphors. Such onomasiological metaphor analysis (Jäkel 2003)

2. Conceptualising presidential elections: Some standard alternative

In discourse about US-American elections, we can find some highly conventional

1. This observation is confirmed by a check of the Corpus of Contemporary American English

(9) Battle for the toss-up states. [CNN headline, 10/14/2008]

3. Deliberate or purposeful? How to analyse metaphors in political

Before we continue to analyse the use of metaphors in political discourse with a

of purposeful metaphor is as follows (2012: 2): “I propose the term ‘purposeful

4. Competing metaphorical models: Trump versus Clinton

5. Obama’s alternative model

part of his alltime favourite, the conceptual metaphor of politics / political

(16b) that we did not turn back nor did we falter,

– Cairo Speech (6 / 2009) 2.44%

6. Summary and conclusion

Cameron, Lynne (2003). Metaphor in Educational Discourse. London/New York: Continuum.

This corpus study investigates the uptake and (non-)continuation of

Keywords: migration discourse, news reader comments, Critical Discourse

The unprecedented number of people crossing the Mediterranean to seek pro-

between (conservative) politicians’ voices and refugees’ voices in news reports, a