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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 8:2 (2017) ► pp.281–311

Metaphors of parliamentary budget debates in times of crisis

The case of the UK and the Montenegrin parliament

| University of Montenegro

The aim of this paper is to explore the metaphoric imprint the global financial crisis has left on the discourse of parliamentary budget debates, which are at the intersection of political and economic discourse, as well as the imprint the MPs have tried to leave on the electorate by carefully selecting metaphors to hide agency, disclaim responsibility and project themselves as saviours. We focus both on conceptual and linguistic metaphors, trying, simultaneously, to account for how the metaphors are developed in the debate. The corpus comprises two budget debates held at the time the financial crisis was in full swing (conducted in the Parliament of Montenegro and the UK House of Commons). The recurrent conceptual metaphors related to the economic crisis were analysed for the two parts of the corpus respectively – the results were compared and similarities were observed in terms of the metaphors used and the discourse strategies behind their selection.

Keywords: parliamentary debate, conceptual metaphor, linguistic metaphor, economic crisis, disclaiming responsibility, hiding agency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Parliamentary discourse
    • 2.2Metaphor in cognitive linguistics
      • Conceptual metaphor and politics
      • Conceptual metaphor and the economy
      • Metaphor development in talk
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.The Montenegrin data
  • 5.The UK data
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.8.2.06sta
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