Metaphorische Phraseme im politischen Diskurs. Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel von europarlamentarischen Reden

The present paper examines in a broad sense metaphorical idiomatic expressions (ranging from fully idiomatic expressions to weakly idiomatic, conventionalized constructions) in political speeches from a classificatory, cognitive, cultural, and pragmatic-functional perspective, drawing on quantitative data and qualitative case studies. The study combines theoretical approaches from cognitive linguistics, including cognitive grammar, frame semantics, conceptual metaphor theory, and conceptual integration theory, with the cognitive conventional figurative language theory (that emphasizes the cultural embedding of conventionalized figurative meaning) as well as with discursive observations concerning argumentation and other functions. Based on a corpus of 300 occurrences, the analysis shows that political activity in a broad sense (such as the capacity to act, decision-making logic, urgency, moral evaluation) is predominantly conceptualized through spatial, physical, military, and architectural image schemata and frames whose interaction and blending motivate figurative meaning not only metaphorically, but also metonymically, indexically, symbolically, and textually, with systematic implications for discursive and argumentative functions.