Andreas Musolff (Durham) p.66-80
2000 Issue 3
Abstract
Metaphors play a central role in public debates about the structure of the European Union, both nationally and internationally. Some metaphors are shared across different languages; however, the “same” metaphor may have contrasting argumentative functions in different discourse communities. The article investigates the argumentative potential of ship journey and convoy metaphors that have been used in the public debates about Europe in Britain and Germany and relates their main variants to prevalent attitudes towards the EU integration process in the two countries. The study is based on a bilingual corpus of British and German media texts from the period 1989-2000, which has been assembled as part of a collaborative project on “Attitudes towards Europe”, funded by the British Council and the DAAD under the “ARC” programme. The article raises methodological issues concerning the use of corpus data in metaphor analysis and points out possibilities for the use of contrastive metaphor analysis in German area studies and comparative media studies.