CIAO DATE: 10/2014
Volume: 16, Issue: 2
April 2013
Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political
Alan Cienki, Dvora Yanow
The articles in this special issue on linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political share the goal of taking language seriously, achieved through detailed attention to linguistic usage in its respective contexts. They reflect a stance common to both cognitive linguistic and interpretive/constructivist approaches, namely a view of language as integrally constituting the world it presents, reflecting, at least in part, its users' experiences of that world. One key form of language use discussed is that of metaphor. Rather than being seen as merely a poetic device, metaphor is viewed in several of the articles as playing a pivotal role in the framing of policy or political issues, which it does by casting one idea in terms of the imagery of another. For example, talking about a political entity, such as a country, in terms of it being a kind of container can invite certain inferences about how political states function - in this case, reasoning about inclusion of members within the state ‘container' vs. exclusion from it. The research shows that metaphors often have important ties with categorisation, the categories used being determined in part by the words we use to name concepts. In addition to metaphor, metonymy also plays a significant role. The articles show the intimate relationship between political language and political acts.
Constituting China: the role of metaphor in the discourses of early Sino-American relations
Eric M Blanchard
This paper demonstrates the value of political metaphor analysis as a tool for answering constitutive questions in International Relations (IR) theory, questions that attend to how the subjects of international politics are constituted by encounters with other subjects through representational and interactional processes. To this end, I examine the key metaphors within American political discourse that guided and structured early Sino-American interactions, focusing on US Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door notes and the contemporaneous Chinese Exclusion Acts. Viewed from a social constructivist metaphor perspective, this metaphorical protection of free trade and great power privilege hid the assumption that China was unable to act as its own doorkeeper, obscuring debates in the domestic and international spheres as to the meaning of ‘Chinese' and the appropriate strategy for managing the encounter. A second approach, the cognitive perspective, builds on the seminal IR applications of cognitive linguistics and cognitive metaphor theory to reveal the deeper conceptual basis, specifically the container schema, upon which this encounter was predicated. Used in tandem, these two approaches to the constitutive role of political metaphor illuminate the processes by which metaphors win out over competing discourses to become durable features of international social relations.
People out of place: allochthony and autochthony in the Netherlands' identity discourse - metaphors and categories in action
Dvora Yanow, Marleen van der Haar
As with much of Europe, the Netherlands has no explicit ‘race' discourse; however, the state, through its public policy and administrative practices, does categorise its population along ‘ethnic' lines, using birthplace - one's own or one's (grand-) parent's - as the surrogate determining factor. The contemporary operative taxonomy has until recently been binary: autochtoon (of Dutch heritage) and allochtoon (of foreign birth). Used earlier at the provincial level in respect of internal migration, the taxonomy was expanded in 1999 to demarcate between ‘Western' allochtoon and ‘non-Western' allochtoon, with the latter being further subdivided into first and second generation. Informed by a ‘generative metaphor' approach (Schon 1979) that links cognition to action, this article subjects the allochtoon/autochtoon binary to metaphor analysis and the Western/non-Western taxonomy to category analysis. The work done by ‘birthplace' in the term pair suggests that they are, in their everyday usage, surrogates for a race discourse, carrying the same (ancient) assumptions about individual identity and the earth-air-sun-water of the spot on which one was born that underlies definitions-in-use of ‘race'. Their meaning in contemporary policy discourse derives from the interaction of metaphoric and category structures, with implications for policy implementation.
How are language constructions constitutive? Strategic uses of conventional discourses about immigration
Claudia Strauss
Metaphor theorists often state that metaphors are constitutive of thought and action. This article asks how language constructions are constitutive of policy, using the example of immigration policies in the United States. First, the claims of some metaphor analysts are scrutinised. Then a different approach is proposed, one that focuses on formulaic, oft-repeated schemas, or conventional discourses. Conventional discourses are not the same as Foucauldian discursive frameworks. Instead, they are stock rhetorical-interpretive frameworks. For policymakers they serve as mental shortcuts and political identity signals. Political speeches are constructed from multiple conventional discourses; 18 conventional discourses about immigration were drawn upon in just one Congressional debate. Their variety and numbers indicate the possibilities for differing policy emphases. Such constructions, including the formulaic metaphors that are typical of a particular conventional discourse, are constitutive in only a limited sense; they are suggestive without being determinative. Skilful politicians can creatively combine conventional discourses with rhetorical strategies of concession, springboarding, and co-optation to align with multiple constituencies, including ones on opposing sides of an issue. These points are illustrated with the example of U.S. Congressional debate about HR 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.
Bringing concepts from cognitive linguistics into the analysis of policies and the political
Alan Cienki
The articles in this special issue all seek to highlight the ways in which concepts from linguistics can enlighten analyses of policies and the political. In this commentary, I seek to situate some of the central concepts that have been employed in terms of their treatment in cognitive linguistics. The first part of this commentary focuses on metaphor - a construct that receives explicit analysis in these works as it is a fundamental tool we use for thinking about and expressing abstract concepts. The discussion then turns to a topic underpinning all of these studies, even while remaining implicit in them, namely metonymy: the mention of a part to stand for a whole, a whole for a part, and other relations of association. This section considers the important role of metonymy in providing a compact means for politicians, policy-makers, and/or average citizens to make reference to, and reason about, complex topics. At the same time, metonymy also carries the risk of reflecting, or inducing, unwarranted logical inferences. The third topic taken up here is categories; key issues considered are the variety of structures that categories can manifest and how these structures are pertinent in different ways in differing contexts, including classical categories that metaphorically function like containers, vs prototype categories with fuzzy boundaries. Employing these approaches in the analysis of policies and the political therefore involves not only a linguistic turn, but also a cognitive one.