National Conceptualisations of the Body Politic: Cultural Experience and Political Imagination

✍ Scribed by Andreas Musolff

• Publisher: Springer Singapore;Springer
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 211
• Series: Cultural Linguistics
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book presents the results of a large-scale experiment into interpretations of the metaphor “the Nation as a Body” among 1,800+ respondents from 30 linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In this first account of an empirical study of cross-cultural global metaphor interpretation of that scale, Musolff confirms that the meanings of metaphors are complex, culturally mediated and may differ for senders and recipients. The book provides a historical and cultural map of the traditions underlying differences in how the nation as a body – or, “the body politic” – is understood. Musolff challenges the hypotheses of the universality of “the nation” as a predominantly male-gendered and hierarchically organized concept and, in so doing, puts into question some of the key presuppositions of traditional historical and cognitive approaches to metaphor. For scholars and students of figurative language, the book lays out methodological foundations for cross-cultural metaphor comparison and reveals hidden meaning differences in political metaphor in English as lingua franca.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Figurative Conceptualisations of the Nation(-State) (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 1-13
Nation, Nationalism and Metaphor (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 15-33
The Nation as a Body or Person in Present-Day British Political Discourse (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 35-50
Cultural Conceptualisations of the Nation as a Body or Person: Scenario Analysis of Metaphor Interpretations (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 51-65
The Nation as a Body or Person in the English L1 Sample (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 67-77
The Nation as a Body or Person in the German L1 Sample and Other Germanic L1 Samples: Dutch, Norwegian (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 79-92
The Nation as a Body or Person in Romance L1 Language Samples: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, French and Portuguese (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 93-111
The Nation as a Body or Person in Slavic L1-Language Samples: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 113-129
The Nation as a Body or Person in Other European L1 Language Samples: Hungarian, Lithuanian and Greek (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 131-142
The Nation as a Body or Person in L1 Language Samples from Middle Eastern Countries: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Israel, Pakistan (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 143-158
Understanding the Nation as Body/Person from Asian Perspectives: China and Japan (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 159-174
Cultural Variation in Figurative Scenarios of the Nation’s Body and/or Person (Andreas Musolff)....Pages 175-185
Back Matter ....Pages 187-207

✦ Subjects

Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Philosophy of Language; Political Theory; Cultural History