A cross-linguistic analysis of the ‘homework metaphor in German and English political discourse

A frequently encountered expression in political discourse across languages is the assertion that someone has not “done their homework”. As the expression is a combination of structural metaphor and understatement, it is a figurative frame that simplifies public debates by presenting complex issues such as economic reforms as simple tasks and stifles critical and consensual political debates by replacing questions of fairness and adequacy with unquestionable moral obligation. In spite of this manipulative force, metaphor research has paid little attention to this metaphor. I investigate its emergence and pragmatic effects in American and German newspaper discourse through the COHA/COCA and Die ZEIT corpora. Findings for both English and German show that, while the metaphor was originally used for positive self- and negative other-representation, it is now used increasingly often without specifying whether or not someone has done their homework, which is evidence to suggest that it has become accepted in public discourse as a normal way of framing political issues.This work is part of the ModevigTrad (Evidentiality and epistemicity in texts of evaluative discourse genres. Contrastive analysis and translation) project, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (grant number FFI2014-57313-P)

‘Choose, collect, manage, win!’: Neoliberalism, enterprising culture and risk society in video game covers

This article aims to identify the relationship between video games and neoliberal values. To fulfil this aim, it analyses the covers of the 20 top-selling video games in the United States each year from 2010 to 2014 (a total of 80 different games). Video game covers are a type of paratext, that is, texts that accompany another text to promote it and to guide its reading. Thus, video game covers choose and highlight some of the games’ features over others, and by doing that they construct a discourse. In this article, it is argued that regardless of genre, the covers analysed convey and promote neoliberal values, such as freedom and choice, entrepreneurship, consumption and accumulation of goods, customization, novelty, individualism and meritocracy. This promotion of neoliberal values is combined with an appeal to the concerns of ‘risk society’. Thus, the covers of the top-selling video games play on fears linked to the new context created by the economic crisis while at the same time legitimizing the neoliberal ideal of the ‘enterprising self’ as a model for dealing with it