Metaphor Interpretation and Cultural Linguistics

Metaphor use is characterised by conceptual variation that can be explained with reference to culture-specifi c discourse traditions.Cognitively oriented metaphor analyses that are interested in cultural relativity have so far concentrated mainly on the production side of metaphors and their misunderstanding by ESL learners.This study,by contrast,focuses on variation in metaphor interpretation across groups of ESL/EFL users from 31 cultural and linguistic backgrounds.Its data consist of a questionnaire survey,administered in 10 countries,which gave students the task of applying the metaphor of the"body politic"to one’s home nation.The results show systematic variation between four interpretation models for this metaphor,i.e.NATION AS GEOBODY,NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE,NATION AS PART OF SELF and NATION AS PART OF INTERNATIONAL/GLOBAL STRUCTURE,as well as some evidence of polemical and/or political elaboration.The two main versions,i.e.NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS FUNCTIONAL WHOLE,were represented across all cohorts but exhibited opposite frequency patterns across Chinese v.Western cohorts,with the former favouring GEOBODYbased,the latter functional interpretations.This fi nding provides evidence of culture-specifi c variation in metaphor interpretation(as well as in metaphor production),specifically with regard to the frequency and distribution patterns of source concepts.Metaphor interpretation analysis can thus contribute to a cognitive metaphor analysis in general and especially to the"cultural linguistics"approach to metaphor.

Wilhelm Ⅱ's ‘Hun Speech’ and Its Alleged Resemiotization During World War Ⅰ

Kaiser Wilhelm Ⅱ’s speech to a German contingent of the Western expedition corps to quell the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ in 1900 and develop the imperialist drive for colonies further, is today remembered chiefly as an example of his penchant for sabre-rattling rhetoric. The Kaiser’s appeal to his soldiers to behave towards Chinese like the ‘Huns under Attila’ was, according to some accounts, the source for the stigmatizing label Hun(s) for Germans in British and US war propaganda in WWⅠ and WWⅡ, which has survived in popular memory to this day. However, there are hardly any reliable data for such a link and evidence of the use of ‘Hun’ as a term of insult in European Orientalist discourse. On this basis, we argue that a ‘model’ function of Wilhelm’s speech for the post-1914 uses highly improbable and that, instead, the Hun-stigma was re-contextualised and re-semiotized in WWⅠ. For the duration of the war it became a multi-modal symbol of allegedly ‘typical’ German war brutality. It was only later, reflective comments on this post-1914 usage that picked up on the apparent link of the anti-German Hun-stigma to Wilhelm’s anti-Chinese Hun speech and gradually became a folk-etymological ‘explanation’ for the dysphemistic lexeme. The paper thus exposes how the re-semiotized term Hun was retrospectively interpreted in a popular etymological narrative that reflects changing connotations of political semantics.