Abstract
The articles in this special issue on linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political share the goal of taking language seriously, achieved through detailed attention to linguistic usage in its respective contexts. They reflect a stance common to both cognitive linguistic and interpretive/constructivist approaches, namely a view of language as integrally constituting the world it presents, reflecting, at least in part, its users’ experiences of that world. One key form of language use discussed is that of metaphor. Rather than being seen as merely a poetic device, metaphor is viewed in several of the articles as playing a pivotal role in the framing of policy or political issues, which it does by casting one idea in terms of the imagery of another. For example, talking about a political entity, such as a country, in terms of it being a kind of container can invite certain inferences about how political states function — in this case, reasoning about inclusion of members within the state ‘container’ vs. exclusion from it. The research shows that metaphors often have important ties with categorisation, the categories used being determined in part by the words we use to name concepts. In addition to metaphor, metonymy also plays a significant role. The articles show the intimate relationship between political language and political acts.
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Acknowledgements
The idea for this special issue developed out of a panel on metaphor and other tropes at the 2009 meeting of the International Studies Association in New York, organised by Eric Blanchard and Dvora Yanow, chaired by Ido Oren with Alan Cienki as discussant. The articles by Blanchard and by Yanow and Marleen van der Haar originated in that session. Some months before that, Cienki and Yanow had organised a panel on communicating and interpreting policy meanings at the 2008 ‘Language, Culture, and Mind’ conference in Odense, Denmark, which included earlier versions of the articles of Paul Davidson and Claudia Strauss. We thank the participants in those sessions, the reviewers who offered comments on these manuscripts, and, in particular, Patrick Jackson, JIRD's previous editor, who responded favourably to the idea of a special issue and saw it through to publication. Alan Cienki also thanks the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) for a Fellowship in the 2009–2010 academic year, which helped provide time and space for work on this special issue.
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Cienki, A., Yanow, D. Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political. J Int Relat Dev 16, 167–176 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.28