Conceptual metaphors in citizen discourse about Belgian federalism: what can linguistic research gain from a more global approach to political corpora?

In the wake of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work (1980), much attention has been devoted to the study of metaphors not as rhetoric figures but as conceptual tools structuring complex realities. While conceptual metaphors occur in every area of life, the political domain remains one prominent area where to find metaphors. This importance of metaphors in politics has among others been stressed by Charteris-Black (2011, 28) who highlights their contribution to the construction of more accessible ‘mental representations of political issues’ and suggests their power resides in their ability to ‘activate unconscious emotional associations’, which ‘contributes to myth creation’.
Accordingly, scholars in linguistics and in political science have moved toward investigating the use of metaphors in various political domains (for an overview, see Bougher 2012). Yet, in these accounts of the metaphor’s role in politics, the predominant focus has always been on discourses by the political elites (see for instance Charteris-Black 2011). While the metaphors used by the elites are definitely relevant because they illustrate how they frame the political debate, citizens’ discourse about politics should also be taken into account. More specifically, research on citizen data can lead to two specific kinds of insights: on the one hand, it makes it possible to assess to what extent metaphors produced by the political elite are integrated in the citizens’ political reasoning, but on the other hand, it also offers the opportunity to look at how citizens ‘generate their own metaphors (i.e., spontaneous metaphors) to make sense of the political environment’ (Bougher 2012, 149).
The relevance of metaphors in citizen discourse has been confirmed by Perrez & Reuchamps (2015) who showed that citizens do produce metaphors when talking about complex political processes and that these metaphors reveal different political visions. Against this background, this contribution will present the results of new citizen data analyses, collected in 2017 and 2018 in the Dutch-, French- and German-speaking communities of Belgium. Comparing this new citizen corpus with the one used in Perrez & Reuchamps (2015) will make it possible to analyse to what extent the metaphor use of citizens has evolved over time and different political contexts.