A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Conceptual Metaphors of Brexit: Evidence From English, German and Serbian

Abstract

Conceptual metaphor has long been recognised to reflect our human emotional and cognitive world. Its ability to evoke emotional response and influence attitudes makes conceptual metaphor ideal for the use in political content. A recent controversial political issue is Brexit. The objective of the present paper is to compare the metaphor use in the British Brexit discourse to the metaphor use in the media of other language areas. The chosen languages are German, as language of another EU country and Serbian as the language of a country that is not in the European Union and is therefore not directly affected by Brexit so far. The data is taken from reliable online media sources of Britain, Germany and Serbia. Metaphors have been identified using the MIPVU procedure in 20 articles for each language. In a total of 259 metaphors, the three languages show interesting differences in the use of conceptual metaphors in the context of Brexit.