Case-study of English, German and Croatian Sports Metaphors in Political Discourse during the 2019 European Parliament Elections

This paper analyses the use of figurative language, namely conceptual sports metaphors, in political discourse covering the 2019 European Parliament Elections in three countries: the United Kingdom, Germany and Croatia. Over the last decades there has been extensive research on conceptual metaphor and its undisputed role in political campaigns because of its significance in shaping our way of thinking, perceiving and reaching decisions (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). As put by Mussolf (2004) and Wodak (2011), figurative language is widely used by politicians as one of the means of achieving of their political goals. It is seen as language in which speakers have one thing in mind while uttering something entirely different (Gibbs and Colston 2012), which underlines the importance of interpreting figurative meaning. Charteris-Black (2005) reveals a distinctive characteristic of figurative language, i.e. the power to provoke strong emotions, enabling clever manipulation of the electorate. In the research of Pavić Pintarić (2015), modified idioms are used to express emotions. According to Semino and Masci (1996), one of the most common conceptual metaphors establishing a close connection between sports and politics is politics is football. The authors state that the popularity of football and the success of national football team are employed as symbols of national identity in favour of a particular political party, namely that of Silvio Berlusconi. Furthermore, Charteris-Black (2005) argues that political topics are more easily dealt with when discussed in terms of sports (e.g. baseball, American football) and that Bill Clinton’s use of sports metaphors portrays him as an ordinary male American who shares the same interests and passions as his voters. 

This case study is based on research conducted within the framework of a larger project, i.e. a thesis exploring the use of figurative language in political discourse in English, German and Croatian media covering the 2019 European parliamentary elections. The corpus created for this paper includes 90 online newspaper articles (30 articles per language) randomly selected from the main corpus that was manually collected from 1 April 2019 to 10 June 2019. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at the use of sports metaphors in the domain of politics, such as the ball is in your court, to quit a race, ein politisches Schwergewicht, unter die Gürtellinie treffen, ući kao treći igrač, glavni favorit za funkciju. The analysis focuses on identifying and interpreting cultural specificities in the use of conceptual sports metaphors in English, German and Croatian, as well as detecting the creative potential of metaphor in the form of neologisms according to Omazić (2015) and in line with the postulates of the Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The paper utilizes a combination of two methods. The first one is the analysis of linguistic expressions at the lexical level according to Steen’s Metaphor Identification Procedure (2010) in which all lexical items are checked for their basic and contextual meaning. If there is a difference between the two meanings and the contextual meaning can be understood through comparison, then it is a metaphorical meaning. The second method is the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor established by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), i.e. the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which facilitates the process of understanding abstract concepts (a target domain) in terms of simpler, more concrete ones (a source domain) by activating similarity-based correspondences between the two concepts. According to preliminary results, the most frequent conceptual sports metaphor in the German corpus is politics is boxing as opposed to politics is a race in the English and politics is football in the Croatian one.