Social exclusion as conceptual and grammatical metaphor : a cross-genre study of British policy-making.

Koller, Veronika and Davidson, Paul (2008) Social exclusion as conceptual and grammatical metaphor : a cross-genre study of British policy-making. Discourse and Society, 19 (3). pp. 307-331. ISSN 0957-9265

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Abstract

This article analyses `social exclusion' as conceptual and grammatical metaphor, discussing the concept's ideological impact on British policy-making. It complements work in political theory by employing a cognitive critical view of discourse and metaphor. The study draws on five different genres and analyses them quantitatively and qualitatively, looking at lemmas and their grammatical functions, clusters and collocations, and metaphoric expressions. In the data, society is conceptualized as a bounded space with a normative centre and a problematic periphery, with movement towards the centre as the aim of policy-making. Conceptual and grammatical metaphor interact because society is metaphorized as a bounded space, while the collocation `social exclusion' represents an abstract agentless nominalization and is re-concretized through a conceptual metaphor that casts it as a malleable object. This interplay of different forms of metaphor frames the discourse of social exclusion and orients political thought and action towards the reproduction, rather than transformation, of inequality.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Discourse and Society
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3315
Subjects:
?? cognitive metaphor theory • grammatical metaphor • ideology • inequality • policy-making • social exclusioncommunicationsociology and political sciencep philology. linguistics ??
ID Code:
1336
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
07 Feb 2008 10:16
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 09:28