Ideological influence on BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches

Abstract

This article studies the conceptual metaphor A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING in Taiwanese presidential speeches. Two culture-specific metaphor patterns are identified as being unusually productive in the corpora: retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors. These clusters of BUILDING metaphors deviate from the BUILDING metaphors reported in previous literature at two levels. At the conceptual level, retrospective BUILDING metaphors include FORERUNNERS ARE BUILDERS and PAST HISTORY IS FOUNDATION, and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors involve COMMUNISTS ARE DESTROYERS and THE COMMUNIST TAKEOVER IS DESTRUCTION. At the ideological level, history puts such metaphor uses into perspective as rhetorical strategies employed by Kuomintang presidents to instill a Chinese ideology. The Democratic Progressive Party president, by contrast, tries to replace such metaphors with alternatives, which results in his overall low number of BUILDING metaphors. These different framing strategies reflect the manipulation of metaphors to appropriate ideological issues to each presidents' respective political advantage.

Metaphor as a Medium for Emotion: An Empirical Study

“…The majority of corpus-linguistic studies were concerned with metaphorical expressions and mappings within a limited domain, e.g., WAR, BUSINESS, FOOD or PLANT metaphors (Santa Ana, 1999;Izwaini, 2003;Koller, 2004;Skorczynska Sznajder and Pique-Angordans, 2004;Lu and Ahrens, 2008;Low et al, 2010;Hardie et al, 2007), in a particular genre or type of discourse (Charteris-Black, 2000;Cameron, 2003;Lu and Ahrens, 2008;Martin, 2006;Beigman Klebanov and Flor, 2013).…”

Designing the welfare state: Selected building metaphors of the welfare state across the British press

“…He finds such metaphors have an overwhelmingly positive evaluation (though he does give an example to the contrary), expressing as they do 'aspiration towards desired social goals' (70) and allowing a positive presentation of delayed rewards, justifying 'patience and effort' (71). Lu and Ahrens (2008) relativise his conclusions somewhat, finding different functions and connotations of BUILDING metaphors in a corpus of Taiwanese political speeches.…”

The role of metaphor and metonymy in framing terrorism

“…On the one hand, the metaphor of the mass production was used to show that cloning creates imitations of the original product and that scientific action can lead to apocalyptic scenarios; on the other hand, the same metaphor was used to focus on cloning as an important resource for human organ transplantation while presenting the scientific progress as a controlled process that can improve living conditions. Turning to political discourse or political issues, several studies (Lu & Ahrens, 2008;Musolff, 2006) show that the way a metaphor is used to frame events can be motivated by political dispositions and ideology. Analyzing Taiwanese political discourse, Lu and Ahrens (2008) observe that the building metaphor is framed differently by successive Taiwanese presidents: by using different subsets of this metaphor, each president communicates a particular message which reveals and promotes his political, cultural and ideological worldview.…”