Creativity in Metaphor Interpretation

This paper looks at corpus- and survey-based evidence of innovative interpretative metaphor use that changes the default meaning of well-established figurative constructions. Specifically, we look at interpretation induced changes in the meaning of corporeal metaphors, on the basis of a corpus of British political discourse and a questionnaire survey of more than 1000 respondents from 31 linguistic backgrounds in 10 countries. The corpus-based evidence consists of metaphor-production data that show how situational variation in metaphor use can over time create a semantic-pragmatic drift that changes the dominant meaning of a conventional metaphor expression. The questionnaire survey reveals four distinct models for BODY focused readings (i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, AS HIERARCHICAL FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, AS PART OF SPEAKER’S BODY, AS PART OF LARGER BODY), plus a further set PERSON-focused readings. The two most frequent BODY-focused interpretations, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS HIERARCHICAL FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, as well as the PERSON-stereotypes versions show divergent frequency and elaboration patterns across the Chinese- vs. English-L1 respondent groups, which may be linked to specific cultural conceptual and discursive traditions. Both data sets indicate a strong creative element in metaphor interpretation, which accounts for a significant degree of variation in the creation of new metaphorical concepts

The “legitimation” of hostility towards immigrants’ languages in press and social media: Main fallacies and how to challenge them

On the basis of internet forum and press media data, this article studies the expression of hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism in the context of debates about immigration. The forum data are drawn from the BBC’s Have Your Say website, which is a moderated forum that excludes polemical and abusive postings. Nevertheless, it still seems to provide its users ample opportunity for airing strongly anti-immigrant attitudes. The narratives in which these attitudes are being expressed are exemplary stories of the posters’ supposed encounters with the use of foreign languages in the street, in the workplace or at school. This presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is evaluated as being (at least) problematic and is “explained” as a result of mass immigration, which serves to reinforce the scenario of a culture mix that will destroy British “home” culture. Media coverage of immigration partly supports such vilification of multilingualism and multiculturalism, and the reports and comments often seem to be drawn from similar narrative-argumentative templates as those of the discussions on Have Your Say. In conclusion, we argue that counterspeech informed by Critical Discourse Analysis has to develop alternative narratives and figurative scenarios that question the bias against linguistic and cultural diversity

Wilhelm II’s ‘Hun Speech’ and Its Alleged Resemiotization During World War I

Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speech to a German contingent of the Western expedition corps to quell the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ in 1900 and develop the imperialist drive for colonies further, is today remembered chiefly as an example of his penchant for sabre-rattling rhetoric. The Kaiser's appeal to his soldiers to behave towards Chinese like the ‘Huns under Attila’ was, according to some accounts, the source for the stigmatizing label Hun(s) for Germans in British and US war propaganda in WW1 and WW2, which has survived in popular memory to this day. However, there are hardly any reliable data for such a link and evidence of the use of ‘Hun’ as a term of insult in European Orientalist discourse. On this basis, we argue that a ‘model’ function of Wilhelm’s speech for the post-1914 uses highly improbable and that, instead, the Hun-stigma was re-contextualised and re-semiotized in WW1. For the duration of the war it became a multi-modal symbol of allegedly ‘typical’ German war brutality. It was only later, reflective comments on this post-1914 usage that picked up on the apparent link of the anti-German Hun-stigma to Wilhelm’s anti-Chinese Hun speech and gradually became a folk-etymological 'explanation' for the dysphemistic lexeme. The paper thus exposes how the re-semiotized term Hun was retrospectively interpreted in a popular etymological narrative that reflects changing connotations of political semantics

The afterlife of an infamous gaffe:Wilhelm II’s ‘Hun speech’ of 1900 and the anti-German Hun stereotype during World War I in British and German popular memory

Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speech to a German contingent of the international expedition corps, sent to quell the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ in 1900, is today remembered chiefly as an example of his penchant for boastful, sabre-rattling rhetoric that included a strange comparison of his soldiers with the ‘Huns under Attila’. According to some accounts, this comparison was the source for the stigmatizing label Hun(s) for Germans in British and US war propaganda in WW1 and WW2, which has survived in popular memory and continues to be used, though mainly in ironical senses, by British and German media to this day. This paper charts the history of the Germans-as-Huns analogy and argues first, that the usage data render highly improbable any ‘model’ function of Wilhelm’s speech for post-1914 uses. Furthermore, present-day uses presuppose an awareness of the WW1 and WW2 meaning on the part of readers, which serves as a platform for echoic allusions. In the British media these allusions often lead to the ironical (including self-ironical) subversion of preceding uses, while in German public discourse they focus more on historical commemoration and comparison

"You keep telling us different things, what do we believe?”:Meta-communication and meta-representation in police interviews

Quotation and reflective interpretation of previous statements are common features in police interviews. Of particular importance is the uncovering of apparent contradictions between earlier and current responses in interviews of suspects. Conflicting statements can be used by officers as triggers to elicit new responses that explain inconsistencies. In linguistic pragmatics, such reflective commenting on utterances is categorized as metacommunication, i.e. ‘communication about communication’, which includes metarepresentation, i.e. second-order representation of another representation through some form of quotation. Such instances of metacommunication are key-instances of negotiating the communicative interests of its chief participants, which in a suspect interviews consist on the one hand in the interviewers’ purpose of establishing grounds for a potential criminal charge and, on the other hand, the interviewee’s interest in avoiding such a charge. This article analyses exemplary cases of metacommunication in multilingual police interviews from the perspective of quotation pragmatics. The results suggest that police interview training should pay special attention to this area in order to optimise cognitive results

Friedrich Max Müller’s Cultural Concept of Metaphor

This paper analyses Müller’s concept of metaphor, which he expounded in the eight of his second series of Lectures on the Science of Language (1863). It highlights the central role that metaphor played in Müller’s theory of mythology, as well as his critical appraisal of the latter as a form of ‘diseased language’. This critical ‘deconstruction’ of metaphors and mythology was, however, no end in itself but an application of the comparative, ‘historical’ philology that had clarified the ‘genealogical’ relationships of (Indo-European) languages and was now to be applied to cultures. Müller’s position in the history of metaphor theory is that of an outsider, but his emphasis on the role of metaphor reinterpretation in cultural history remains a challenge for philosophy and linguistics

Introduction: Language aggression in public debates on immigration

In Europe and the US, xenophobic discourses against immigrants have been elaborated by populist movements, with far-reaching effects on election campaigns, on referenda and on the relationship of the public with governing elites, not least through the use of social media. Such discourses have been linked with claims of ‘regained’ national, cultural or ethnic identity and ‘liberation’ on the part of the anti-immigration ‘we-group’ that have fostered demands, and sometimes near-triumphalist assertions of ‘taking’ one’s (own) country ‘back’ from an unspecified alien occupier. The immigrant is thus seen as an aggressor who threatens to take away one’s identity, and in a kind of ‘identification with the aggressor’ by proxy, the projected national Self feels entitled to defend and reconstitute itself through asserting its own supremacy, wholeness and faultlessness. Conversely, it feels entitled to deny such qualities to immigrants (or also to further ‘Others’, such as current or historical ‘enemy’ collectives who are implicated in dealing with migration) and to demonize them

Metaphor, irony and sarcasm in public discourse

In public political discourse, figurative expressions used by one participant are often followed up and ‘countered’ by other participants through ironical and/or sarcastic allusions or quotations, which are aimed at denouncing the preceding version and/or deriving a new, contrarian conclusion from it. What is the relationship between the figurative template expression and its ironical or sarcastic variants? Using data from a corpus documenting 25 years of debate in Britain about the nation’s place at the heart of Europe, this paper investigates the interplay of metaphor, irony and sarcasm in public discourse. We show that the ‘discourse career’ of this metaphorical slogan bifurcates into two strands, i.e. an affirmative, optimistic use vs deriding and ridiculing uses that depict the heart of Europe as diseased, dead, non-existent or rotten. It is argued that discourse participants need to retain the optimistic template version as a reference point in discourse memory to achieve the intended ironical and/or sarcastic effects, and that the latter are essential to keep the metaphoricity of the slogan ‘alive’

Truth, lies and figurative scenarios:Metaphors at the heart of Brexit

This article studies one of the key-metaphors that has dominated British EU debates for the past 25 years, i.e. the slogan, Britain at the heart of Europe. The discourse career of this metaphor up to the Brexit referendum shows a decline in its affirmative, optimistic use, and a converse increase of deriding uses to the point of declaring the heart of Europe irredeemably diseased, dead, non-existent or rotten. We argue that these changes in the metaphor scenario of the heart of Europe concept helped to entice the British public to integrate the information supplied by pro-Brexit campaigners into a narrative of a dying EU, which motivated their voting preferences. Even statements that were exposed as factually wrong or implausible before the Brexit referendum were still accepted as fitting the narrative and thus considered as more reliable than unframed pieces of counter-information supplied by the Brexit critics

Hostility towards immigrants’ languages in Britain: A backlash against ‘super-diversity’?

Sociolinguists have adopted the concept of ‘super-diversity’ from cultural anthropology to analyse multidimensional changes in ethnolinguistic identities resulting from recent mass migration. Sociolinguistic super-diversity is thus understood as a central aspect of shifts in migration patterns that have increased the complexity of cultural identities beyond traditional, more static ‘multicultural’ diversity, both in Britain and globally. How is the presence of more complex and diverse linguistic identities viewed by the public? This paper explores attitudes towards perceived increased multilingualism and multiculturalism expressed in the BBC’s Have Your Say Internet forum. The majority of postings blame immigrants for communication problems with the British ‘home’ community and allege their unwillingness to learn English; many also assume that (only) a monolingual national community guarantees social coherence and they are dismissive of any language mediation services. In view of these ‘folk-sociolinguistic’ assumptions and linguaphobic attitudes, the notion of super-diversity needs to be reconfigured so as to include the (unintended) adverse impact of the migration-induced increase in the diversity and complexity of imagined ethno-linguistic identities