TY - BOOK ID - 85636193 TI - National conceptualisations of the body politic : cultural experience and political imagination PY - 2021 SN - 981158740X 9811587396 PB - Gateway East, Singapore : Springer, DB - UniCat KW - Sociolinguistics. KW - Language and languages—Philosophy. KW - Political theory. KW - Civilization—History. KW - Philosophy of Language. KW - Political Theory. KW - Cultural History. KW - Administration KW - Civil government KW - Commonwealth, The KW - Government KW - Political theory KW - Political thought KW - Politics KW - Science, Political KW - Social sciences KW - State, The KW - Language and languages KW - Language and society KW - Society and language KW - Sociology of language KW - Language and culture KW - Linguistics KW - Sociology KW - Integrational linguistics (Oxford school) KW - Social aspects KW - Sociological aspects KW - Metaphor KW - Political aspects. KW - Parabole KW - Figures of speech KW - Reification UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85636193 AB - This book presents the results of a large-scale experiment into interpretations of the metaphor “the Nation as a Body” among 1,800+ respondents from 30 linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In this first account of an empirical study of cross-cultural global metaphor interpretation of that scale, Musolff confirms that the meanings of metaphors are complex, culturally mediated and may differ for senders and recipients. The book provides a historical and cultural map of the traditions underlying differences in how the nation as a body – or, “the body politic” – is understood. Musolff challenges the hypotheses of the universality of “the nation” as a predominantly male-gendered and hierarchically organized concept and, in so doing, puts into question some of the key presuppositions of traditional historical and cognitive approaches to metaphor. For scholars and students of figurative language, the book lays out methodological foundations for cross-cultural metaphor comparison and reveals hidden meaning differences in political metaphor in English as lingua franca. ER -