This thesis explores the ideological role of metaphor in British governmental
discourses on ¿social exclusion¿. A hybrid methodology, combining approaches
from Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and cognitive theories of
metaphor, is used to address how social exclusion and other metaphors are deployed
to create an ideologically vested representation of society. The data consists of
linguistic metaphors identified from a 400,000+ word machine-readable corpus of
British governmental texts on social exclusion covering a ten year period (1997-
2007). From these surface level features of text, underlying systematic and
conceptual metaphors are then inferred. The analysis reveals how the interrelation
between social exclusion and a range of other metaphors creates a dichotomous
representation of society in which social problems are discursively placed outside
society, glossing inequalities within the included mainstream and placing the blame
for exclusion on the cultural deficiencies of the excluded. The solution to the
problem of exclusion is implicit within the logic of its conceptual structure and
involves moving the excluded across the ¿boundary¿ to join the ¿insiders¿. The
welfare state has a key role to play in this and is underpinned by a range of
metaphors which anticipate movement on the part of the excluded away from a
position of dependence on the state. This expectation of movement is itself
metaphorically structured by the notion of a social contract in which the socially
excluded have a responsibility to try and include themselves in society in return for
the right of (temporary) state support. Key systematic metaphors are explained by
reference to a discourse-historical view of ideological change in processes of
political party transformation. / BISA and CSV
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/5348 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Davidson, Paul |
| Contributors | Perrigo, Sarah, Koller, Veronika |
| Publisher | University of Bradford, Department of Peace Studies |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, doctoral, PhD |
| Rights | <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. |
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