The use of metaphor in the political and economic fields

Is metaphor just a matter of poetics and style? Cognitive Linguistics claims that we “live by metaphors”1, that metaphorical, and, closely related, metonymic processes are a major device of human conceptualisation. Largely unnoticed, these processes are pervasively and systematically at work in everyday language: clocks have hands, a marriage may be dead, in as time goes by and Christmas is coming, TIME is viewed as an OBJECT which moves through space, in the baby arrived, I went through some hard years and the old man passed away, LIFE is seen as a JOURNEY, etc. The underlying objective of the present thesis argues against the prevailing assumption that metaphor is a figure of speech typical of literary works by investigating non-literary texts with special reference to political and economic texts. The decision to focus on the use of metaphor in the political and economic fields is based on the findings and claims that these fields are pervaded with metaphor and other tropes such as metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, etc.