Abstract
The issue of climate change, like gun control and abortion, has been reframed from science into politics by the U.S. politicians (p.1). This book explores from a cognitive perspective how metaphor in political discourse functions as a conceptual tool to create realities about climate change and influence the addressee’s perception of and responses to the issue.
Chapter 1 outlines the book’s original contributions such as the metaphor opposition theory established by the author to explain how metaphor is used by politicians and media to reframe climate change as a sociopolitical problem as it gains prominence after the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Chapter 2 presents a literature review of major linguistic studies involving climate discourse, most of which employ critical discourse analysis or ecolinguistic approaches, demonstrating the power of policy-makers’ language in shaping citizens’ attitudes, then eliciting their (re)actions and triggering social changes to confront environmental issues. It also specifies the book’s aims such as revealing how realities, shaped from the metaphor opposition, can motivate the addressee to act accordingly. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework, illustrating how critical metaphor analysis is based on critical discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, which jointly explain how ideologically loaded metaphors (Journey, War, Cleanliness, and Construction) can lead to social construction of ecological problems and solutions, affecting climate-related decisions and views of policy makers and public. Chapter 4 presents methods for sampling statements and letters of politicians as research data, who argue for or against the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement. It also details stages for analyzing metaphors: contextual analysis (linguistic and social context), metaphor identification (linguistic analysis), interpretation (discursive analysis) and explanation (social analysis). Chapters 5 and 6 respectively analyze politicians’ use of metaphors supporting and opposing the U.S. exit from the Paris agreement. Chapter 5 identifies seven metaphors in the data (impediment, unfairness, war, journey, cleanliness, construction, and theft), of which impediment is most frequently used, and investigates each conceptual metaphor through source-target mapping and opposition schema. Impediment metaphor, for example, implies that the Paris Agreement hinders the U.S. economy (source-target mapping), and motivates the addressee to promote the economy (opposition schema) by complying with the speaker’s decision to denounce and withdraw from the agreement. Similarly, Chapter 6 extracts four metaphors (journey, war, cleanliness, and construction), of which journey is the most common type, indicating that the Paris agreement is a path leading the U.S. to the destination of a thriving economy and controlled climate, and encouraging the addressee to support climate-targeting measures by remaining committed to the accord. Chapter 7 tackles the centrality of journey metaphor in mixed metaphors from two or more domains, presenting climate change most prominently as a long-term phenomenon where the focus is not on destination but on movement toward the destination. To complement the qualitative analysis of the politicians’ language, Chapter 8 presents a corpus analysis of media discourse on climate change by using Collocate, Frequency and Compare tools of NOW corpus interface (News on the Web). It argues that the media frames climate change as an immediate threat by using frequently lexical items from war metaphor (e.g. combat and fight), and stresses the consequences of climate change with frequent nouns such as effects and impacts. Chapter 9 illustrates the author’s ecosophy (ecological philosophy) that climate change is a verifiable human-made threat to our globe requiring a collective effort like the Paris accord by governments and individuals to protect the environment. Chapter 10 summarizes main findings concerning how climate change is metaphorically conceptualized in the U.S. politics from the perspectives of ecolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. It also outlines directions for future research based on the issues investigated in this book.
The volume’s top merit is its metaphor opposition theory, arguing that the metaphor at the cognitive level is based on two image schemas demonstrated with a multitude of examples in Chapters 5 and 6. The first image schema is mapping (where concepts map from the source into target domain), explaining how the addressee perceives and understands realities about climate change through conceptual metaphor (e.g. journey or war). The second image schema is the opposition (thus, concepts exist as binary), illustrating how metaphors can serve as a motivation or warning pushing the addressee to reason about and act on climate change or comply with the speaker/writer’s argument, thus making social changes as expected by politicians. Put succinctly, this theory claims that while understanding is achieved via mapping, reasoning (deciding on a course of action) is achieved via opposition.
Equally commendable is its contribution to studying climate change debate in the U.S. It reveals the core components and structures of two opposing arguments, namely, the politicians advocating the U.S. exit from the Paris agreement focus on the agreement, conceptualizing it as being unfair to the U.S. interest and as an impediment to the U.S. economic growth. Such realities are constructed through metaphors from source domains like unfairness and business. However, the politicians opposing the exit center on climate change, conceptualizing it as a long-term, threatening problem which needs to be urgently addressed through a global effort like the Paris agreement. They accordingly use metaphors from domains such as journey, war and construction.
One minor drawback of the book is in Chapter 8, whose second section does not have sufficient metaphorical analysis except briefly in the last paragraph in contrast to its detailed statistical investigation into the media reaction to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement. Nevertheless, the book overall illuminates the role of metaphor in the U.S. political discourse of climate change, and therefore is a worthwhile reading for students and academics in cognitive linguistics, ecolinguistics, critical discourse analysis and metaphor studies.