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Part of
Variation in Political Metaphor
Edited by Julien Perrez, Min Reuchamps and Paul H. Thibodeau
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 85] 2019
► pp. 107–130

Chapter 5
Greek metaphors in the fiscal straightjacket

This paper examines the use of figurative language in the context of the Greek financial crisis during the period 2010–2011. In particular it examines the use of metaphor as a framing device (Camp 2015) in five speeches delivered by the Greek Prime Minister, George A. Papandreou. These speeches aimed to officially introduce to the public the collapse of the Greek economy, and most importantly, the change in the financial policies of the government which would be, or were, characterized by harsh economic measures such as job cuts, reduction of wages and pensions, as well as cuts on social spending. A close look at these speeches reveals extensive use of metaphoric language, with positively valenced metaphoric frames significantly outnumbering negative ones. The metaphoric language of the speeches appears in clusters and revolves mainly around three core themes: namely, the state of the economy, the process to improve it, and the role of the Greek people in this process. Variation in political metaphor is observed in these three themes and also in a case of a non-linguistic metaphor related to light. A fact that makes the use of metaphoric language of extreme interest in these speeches is that it is placed within a straightjacket, i.e. the fiscal straightjacket.

Keywords: metaphor, political speech, framing, valence, variation, financial crisis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The fiscal straightjacket
  • 3.Corpus and method
  • 4.Quantitative analysis
  • 5.Positive vs negative metaphoric frames
  • 6.Comparison between positive and negative metaphoric frames
  • 7.Qualitative analysis
  • 8.Central themes and variation in political metaphor
    • 8.1Variation in non-linguistic metaphor
  • 9.Clusters of metaphoric frames
  • 10.Discussion
  • 11.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Speeches
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.85.05vog
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Vogiatzis, Anastasios
2022. Valenced Metaphors in Strategic Communication: The Case of the Greek Economic Crisis. International Journal of Strategic Communication 16:1 ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo

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