What is it about?
The contemporary landscape of metaphor studies features a range of theoretical approaches and methodologies. Al-Shboul’s monograph The Politics in Climate Change Metaphors in the U.S. Discourse proposes Metaphor Feeding Theory to investigate climate change metaphors in U.S. politics. The book aims to provide an in-depth theoretical explanation of metaphor perception and to reveal the politics of climate change metaphors in the U.S. context. Guided by the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and ecolinguistics, and combining the methods of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) with Corpus Linguistics, Al-Shboul’s research mainly contributes to the studies of metaphor cognitive analysis.
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Why is it important?
Overall, the book develops metaphor theory by Metaphor Feeding Theory. The book proposes metaphor opposition theory and integrates it with the established Lakoff and Johnson’s Mapping Theory (1980) through the notion of feeding to build Metaphor Feeding Theory. At the cognitive level, mapping explains how people perceive a reality constructed by metaphors, whereas metaphor opposition interprets how people can be motivated by metaphors to act. Mapping and opposition are complementary in metaphor perception as one feeds the other.
Perspectives
The book extends Charteris-Black’s CMA (2018) with an in-depth cognitive analysis. Metaphor opposition theory unmasks the opposition schema of metaphor perception, and this is applied from a cognitive perspective to a case study. Al-Shboul’s research represents a new attempt at the most recent approaches to investigating metaphor at both the linguistic and cognitive levels (e.g., Hidalgo-Downing and Pérez-Sobrino 2022; Saint Preux and Blanco 2021; Castaño 2020). However, the book fails to apply the metaphor opposition framework in analyzing the media discourse. Despite this weakness, with powerful theoretical frameworks and fine-grained case analyses, Al-Shboul’s monograph is a worthwhile read for students and scholars interested in applied linguistics, political communication, ecolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.
Xiaoyu Ren
Hubei University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Review of Al-Shboul (2023): The Politics in Climate Change Metaphors in the U.S. Discourse: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Analysis from an Ecolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective, Journal of Language and Politics, January 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jlp.23152.zho.
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