Metaphorizing Violence in the UK and Brazil: A Contrastive Discourse Dynamics Study

Abstract

A cross-linguistic/cultural study of verbal metaphor compares responses to terrorism in the UK (N = 96) and to urban violence in Brazil (N = 11). Focus groups discussed how violence changes perceptions of risk, decisions of daily life, and attitudes to others. Metaphor vehicles were identified in transcribed data, then grouped together semantically; 15 vehicle groupings were used with similar frequencies, 16 groupings more in UK data, 14 more in Brazil data. Systematic and framing metaphors were found inside vehicle groupings. A small set of frequent verbal metaphors work as predicted by conceptual metaphor theory. Other verbal metaphor vehicles work much more specifically, as posited by discourse dynamics theory, metaphorizing contextually distinct aspects of living with violence. Major differences were found in responses to violence: UK participants demonstrate feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency through metaphor vehicles relating to Games of Chance, the Concealed nature of terrorist activity, and Body Postures negatively evaluating response from the authorities; Brazilian participants use metaphor vehicles of Violence to emphasize how the threat of urban violence itself becomes a powerful social force that constrains daily activities.

Notes

¹Metaphor-led discourse analysis is described in detail in Cameron & Maslen (2010). It combines analysis of metaphors with analysis of their discourse context. In the investigation of empathy, metaphor analysis was combined with positioning analysis, narrative analysis and analysis of the labeling of people.

²It is at this broadest level and scale that the discourse dynamics theory and conceptual metaphor theory are compatible (Cameron, 2007). Grady (1999) suggests that there are “primary (conceptual) metaphors” draw on very basic physical experience and so would be expected to work across languages and cultures (Boers, 2003). The two approaches differ fundamentally in explaining the relationship between this and other levels and scales. Where CMT posits a “downward” force in which individuals somehow possess these large scale conceptual metaphors and produce metaphorical expressions as a consequence, DDT argues for feedback and feedforward loops across levels, for the individual as also social, and for the emergence of verbal metaphors in the process of interaction. See Gibbs (2013) for a recent attempt to combine the two into one model.

³Systematic metaphors—sets of connected metaphors used across a discourse event—are written in Small Italic Capitals .

⁴The use of the traditional A is B format perhaps creates a misleading parallel with conceptual metaphors at this step. Since many verbal metaphors are also in the verb phrase grammatically, there may be more appropriate formats to be developed.

⁵Furthermore, systematic metaphors are not the same as “discourse metaphors” (Zinken, Hellsten, & Nerlich, 2008). Systematic metaphors relate to a particular group of people and their situated discourse activity; discourse metaphors are collected across a large corpus of discourse data from multiple, unconnected discourse events, thus losing the importance of the situatedness of the discourse activity.

⁶Ideally, the two studies would have used the same number of focus groups to reduce the effect of quantity: more data probably always produce a wider range of vehicles.

⁷Extended metaphors produced by only one participant are a limiting case of systematic metaphor, with a short trajectory.