6533b7d4fe1ef96bd1262b5a

RESEARCH PRODUCT

'Rocking the boat' and 'putting spanners in the works': On different metaphorical conceptualizations of the European Union

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The article aims to analyze different metaphorical conceptualizations of the European Union in The Guardian discourse. The corpus of news texts subject to analysis comes from a manually compiled 930,000-word corpus of news articles, retrieved from The Guardian from May 2004 through December 2009. The analysis focuses on four most frequent metaphors identified in the corpus, namely, THE EU IS A HOUSE and THE EU IS AN ELITE CLUB, which are used in the context of the accession of new countries to the EU and the related problem of immigration, as well as THE EU IS A BOAT and THE EU IS A MACHINE, which are embedded in the context of internal EU tensions concerning home affairs. The analysis and discussion of the four metaphorical conceptualizations of the EU is carried out with metaphor operationalized as a framing device in discourse, whose main function is to impose a particular axiologically-charged and ideology-laden construal of a participant/event in discourse.