Part of
Speaking of Europe: Approaches to complexity in European political discourseEdited by Kjersti Fløttum
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 49] 2013
► pp. 135–150
Edited by Kjersti Fløttum
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 49] 2013
► pp. 135–150
The heart of Europe
Synchronic variation and historical trajectories of a political metaphor
The chapter analyses the development of the heart-of-Europe metaphor in British political discourse during the past two decades and in the wider context of conceptual history. On the basis of a corpus of media texts from 1990 to 2010, we chart the discursive career of programmatic statements by successive governments “to put Britain at the heart of Europe” and the metaphor’s changing cognitive import and pragmatic function. We compare this micro-history of the heart of Europe-phrase with the macro-perspective of long-term developments of political metaphors based on heart concepts, which form an important strand of the body politic tradition in European political thought. The combination of discourse history and conceptual history complements and to some extend corrects, an ahistoric cognitive analysis of body-related metaphors which views them as being grounded mainly or exclusively in “primary” (physiological) experiences.
Cited by (21)
Cited by 21 other publications
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2023. Migrants’ NATION-AS-BODY metaphors as expressions of transnational identities. Language and Intercultural Communication 23:3 ► pp. 229 ff.
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2024. Cultural Metaphor and Intercultural Identities. In The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics [Springer Handbooks in Languages and Linguistics, ], ► pp. 21 ff.
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2016. Metaphor evolution and survival in Hungarian public discourse on the Trianon peace treaty. Metaphor and the Social World 6:2 ► pp. 276 ff.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.