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Rhetorical Tropes in Political Discourse 597 Mann W C, Matthiessen C M I M & Thompson S A (1992). Rhetorical structure theory and text analysis.’ In Mann W C & Thompson S A (eds.) Text description: diverse analyses of a fund raising text. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 39–78. Mann W C & Moore J A (1981). ‘Computer generation of multiparagraph text.’ American Journal of Computational Linguistics 7(1), 17–29. Mann W C & Thompson S A (1986). ‘Relational propositions in discourse.’ Discourse Processes 9(1), 57–90. Mann W C & Thompson S A (1988). ‘Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization.’ Text 8(3), 243–281. Marcu D (2000a). ‘The rhetorical parsing of unrestricted texts: a surface-based approach.’ Computational Linguistics 26(3), 395–448. Marcu D (2000b). The theory and practice of discourse parsing and summarization. Boston: The MIT Press. Marcu D, Carlson L & Watanabe M (2000). ‘The automatic translation of discourse structures.’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). http://www.isi.edu/
marcu/papers/dmt-naacl2000.ps. Martin J R (1992). English text: systems and structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Matthiessen C M & Thompson S A (1989). ‘The structure of discourse and ‘‘subordination.’’’ In Haiman J & Thompson S A (eds.) Clause combining in grammar and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Moore J D & Paris C L (1988). ‘Constructing coherent texts using rhetorical relations.’ Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Montreal: Cognitive Science Society. 637–643. Moore J D & Pollack M E (1992). ‘A problem for RST: the need for multi-level discourse analysis.’ Computational Linguistics 18(4), 537–544. O’Donnell M (1997). ‘Variable-length on-line document generation.’ Proceedings of the Flexible Hypertext Workshop of the Eighth ACM International Hypertext Conference. UK: Southampton. 78–82. Ro¨sner D & Stede M (1992). ‘Customizing RST for the automatic production of technical manuals.’ In Dale R,

Hovy E, Ro¨sner D & Stock O (eds.) ‘Aspects of automated natural language generation.’ Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation. Trento, Italy, April 1992. Berlin: Springer. 199–214. Sacerdoti E (1973). ‘Planning in a hierarchy of abstraction spaces.’ Proceedings of IJCAI III: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 412–422. Sanders T J M, Spooren W P M & Noordman L G M (1992). ‘Towards a taxonomy of coherence relations.’ Discourse Processes 15(1), 1–36. Taboada M T (2004). Building coherence and cohesion: task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taboada M & Mann W C (2005). ‘Rhetorical structure theory: looking back and moving ahead.’ Discourse Studies (to appear). Taboada M & Mann W C (2006). ‘Applications of rhetorical structure theory.’ Discourse Studies (8). Vander Linden K (2000). ‘Natural language generation.’ In Jurafsky D & Martin J (eds.) Speech and language processing: an introduction to speech recognition, computational linguistics and natural language processing. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. 763–798. Webber B, Knott A, Stone M & Joshi A (1999). ‘Discourse relations: a structural and presuppositional account using lexicalized TAG.’ ACL 99: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Computational Linguistics. American Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Maryland. 41–48.

Relevant Website http://www.sfu.ca/rst/ – The RST website includes definitions of all the RST relations, many example analyses, and translations of basic introductions in French and Spanish.

Rhetorical Tropes in Political Discourse M Reisigl, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Classical Rhetorical and Actual Characterization of Tropes The Greek substantive ‘tropo´s,’ originally meaning ‘turn’ or ‘direction,’ is derived from the verb ‘tre´pein,’ which signifies ‘to turn (over/round).’ The classical

rhetorical term encompasses all figures of speech that involve a turn of meaning (i.e., a linguistic transference from one conceptual sphere to another). Conventionally, tropes are considered to be conventionalized means of expression of so-called ‘improper speech’ or ‘nonliteral speech,’ which is characterized by a (poetically) licensed difference between the ‘ordinary’ literal and the ‘extraordinary’ intended meaning of a speech. This tropological theory of deviation

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or substitution is nowadays often criticized for mistakenly assuming that tropes are deviations from linguistic normality and can thus simply be replaced by ‘proper’ expressions or phrases. However, tropes are, in fact, very common in ‘everyday language,’ and there is no such thing as an original verbum proprium or substituendum that perfectly corresponds to the trope (cf., among others, Kienpointner, 1999: 66–68). In contrast to other figures of speech (e.g., figures of repetition like anaphora, epiphera, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and parallelism), tropes are said to be more closely related to content than to form or structure. Concerning the relationship between what is said or written and what is meant, Heinrich Lausberg (1990a: 64–79) distinguishes between two types of tropes. Tropes of shifting boundaries (‘Grenzverschiebungstropen’) consist of moving the borders of neighboring semantic fields or the borders within one and the same semantic field. These tropes are determined by a relationship of inclusion or (factual) contiguity between what is said or written and what is meant. They are, accordingly, divided into two subcategories. Periphrasis, litotes, hyperbole, emphasis, antonomasia, and synecdoche are assigned to the first subcategory. They are constituted by shifting the boundary within a semantic sphere. The second subcategory involves a relationship of adjacency. It is prototypically represented by metonymy. The second type of tropes is labeled ‘leaping tropes’ (‘Sprungtropen’). In comparison to tropes that involve shifting boundaries, leaping tropes are grounded on a ‘leap’ from one semantic sphere to another sphere that is not adjacent to the first one. Traditionally, metaphor, allegory, and irony are taken as leaping tropes. Their intended meaning is to be found in a semantic domain that clearly differs from what is actually said or written. In concrete rhetorical analyses, a neat distinction between the two types of tropes – as well as between the single tropes allocated to these two types – is not always feasible, as simultaneous tropic membership of specific linguistic realizations is not unusual (see Fontanier, 1977; Morier, 1989; Lausberg, 1990a, 1990b; Groddeck, 1995; Plett, 2001, for various proposals to classify tropes; see Goossens, 1995, for multiple tropic membership, discussed with the example of ‘metaphtonymy,’ the simultaneous combination of metaphor and metonymy). Antique rhetoric ascribes primarily an ornamental function to tropes. It considers them to be deviations from ordinary language for the sake of adornment. This view of tropes as purely decorative linguistic appendices that are ‘added’ to the linguistic raw material in the rhetorical production stage of

elocution to give glamour to one’s speech has widely been overcome by a reassessment that sees language as basically tropic. Nowadays, it is almost commonplace in modern rhetoric, linguistics, language philosophy, and cognitive science that all areas of language are pervaded with tropes, and that tropes, like metaphors, metonymies, and synecdoches, function as elementary cognitive principles that – often unconsciously – shape and structure human perception and thinking. Tropes are no longer exclusively associated with the stage of elocution; rather, they are also related to the stage of inventio and, of course, to processes of the speech’s reception or apperception.

Political Discourses The contention of the tropes’ pervasiveness in language holds also for the realm of political language, which – generally speaking – evolves in a tension between the preservation and transformation of power relations, public decision making, and problem solving, as well as political order. Many names of political institutions and ‘collective’ political actors have their origin in metaphorization and metonymization (e.g., ‘government,’ ‘parliament,’ ‘minister,’ and ‘ministry’). Political discourses are full of tropes related to the three political dimensions of form (i.e., polity, the basic order related to political norms, institutions, system, and culture), content (i.e., policy, the policy-field-related planning and acting concerning the identification of political problems, the development and implementation of political programs, and the evaluation and correction of their implementation), and process (i.e., politics, the political competition related to the conflicts between political actors and to the achievement of followers and power). In all fields of political action – within and across which discourses manifest themselves – politicians employ these figures of speech as effective rhetorical means of constructing, representing, and transforming political ‘reality,’ as well as a means of political persuasion. ‘Fields of action’ (cf. Girnth, 1996) may be understood as ‘‘places of social forms of practice’’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 74) or, in other words, as frameworks of social interaction (Reisigl, 2003: 148). The spatiometaphorical distinction among different fields of action can be understood as a differentiation between various functions or socially institutionalized aims of discursive practices. Among the political fields are the lawmaking procedure; the formation of public attitudes, opinions, and will; the party-internal formation of attitudes, opinions, and will; the interparty formation of attitudes, opinions, and will; the organization of international and (especially) interstate relations; political advertising; the political executive and

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administration; and the various forms of political control (for more details, see Reisigl, 2003: 128–142). A political ‘discourse’ about a specific topic may have its starting point within one field of action and proceed onward through another one. In this respect, discourses and discourse topics ‘spread’ to different fields and discourses. They cross between fields, overlap, refer to each other, or are in some other way sociofunctionally linked with each other (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 36 f.). In the given context, ‘discourse’ is to be seen as topic-related concept that, among others, involves argumentation about validity claims such as truth and normative validity, as well as pluri-perspectivity constituted by the discursive participation of various social actors who assume different points of view (Reisigl, 2003: 92; for a mono-perspectivist conceptualization of ‘discourse,’ see Fairclough, 1995: 14). Discourses represent semiotic social practices that are both socially constitutive and socially constituted. A political discourse about a particular topic can be understood as a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts. These manifest themselves within, and across, the above-mentioned fields of political action as thematically interrelated and problem-centered semiotic (e.g., oral or written) tokens, very often as ‘texts’ that belong to specific semiotic types (i.e., textual types or genres), which serve particular political purposes (see Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 36). Rhetorical tropes fulfill many different purposes in political discourses, especially in regard to positive political self-presentation and negative political other-presentation. With respect to the ideational metafunction of language, these tropes help to ‘invent’ or construct a political ‘reality’ (e.g., via incorporating metaphors or allegories like the boat or ship metaphor/allegory, referring to a state), to reduce complexities by simplistic categorization and imaginary representation of political ‘reality’ (e.g., via color metaphors referring to alleged human ‘races’), to vivify, personify, and illustrate abstract or unclear political ideas (e.g., via personifications and other animalizing metaphors), to selectively foreground specific traits of political entities or ‘reality’ sectors (e.g., via particularizing synecdoches), and to background or hide specific political aspects, actors, or actions (e.g., via metonymies that represent persons by place names). With respect to the interpersonal metafunction of language, these tropes are employed to promote the identification with single or ‘collective’ political actors (e.g., leaders, parties, states, or nations), as well as with their political aims and ideologies (e.g., via the heart metaphor relating to a specific

nation-state within a confederation of states); to promote in-group solidarity (e.g., via family or kinship metaphors, such as the androcentric metaphor of brotherhood), referring to the imagined community of a nation or of politically united nations; to support out-group segregation and discrimination (e.g., via deprecating animalizing metaphors like parasite, rat, and vermin); to create a feeling of security by suggesting stability and order (e.g., via construction metaphors like house, referring to a state); to create a feeling of insecurity by suggesting chaos, disorder, danger, and threat (e.g., via flood or wave metaphors referring to immigrants); to justify, legitimize, or delegitimize specific political actions or their omission (e.g., via metaphors of gain or cost relating to the consequences of a specific action or omission of action); and to mobilize political followers to perform specific actions which can culminate in physical or military aggression, such as war (e.g., via instigating militarizing metaphors or rape and monster metaphors relating to ‘the enemy’). Some of these functions will be elaborated on in greater detail in the following section.

Toward a Tropology of the Political For a long time, analysis of political language has merely been carried out as a side job both on the part of political scientists interested in issues of language and on the part of linguists interested in political issues. As a consequence, the respective studies in linguistics and political science have frequently been amateurish with respect to theory, methods, and methodology. This critique also relates to the study of tropes in political discourses. Linguistic, and especially rhetorical, approaches often have suffered from politological ignorance and did not venture beyond a positivist identification and enumeration of figures of speech, as well as a very general characterization of the persuasive or manipulative potential of single tropes, especially of metaphors. The analyses of tropes in political science did, however, often not exceed everyday linguistic triviality when selectively looking at ‘linguistic images’ with political significance. A remedy for the many shortcomings in the area can be found in a transdisciplinarian politolinguistic approach that tries to connect and synthesize rhetoric, linguistic discourse analysis, and political science. Such an approach should theoretically rely on actual concepts in political science, as well as on rhetorical and discourse analytical categories such as those outlined in the ‘Classical Rhetorical and Actual Characterization of Tropes’ and ‘Political Discourses’ sections. With respect to the topic in question,

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politolinguistics should build a ‘tropology of the political’ (i.e., a theory of tropes that systematizes and explains the political and linguistic functions or purposes of tropic language in polity, policy, and politics; for a first sketch, see Reisigl, 2002, and Reisigl, 2003: 237–258). In what follows, this tropology is outlined with the example of three of the four so-called ‘master tropes’ (see Burke, 1969: 503–517); that is to say, with the example of metaphor (including personification and allegory, the latter being conceived as continuous, expanded metaphor), metonymy, and synecdoche (including antonomasia as a special form of synecdoche). The fourth alleged ‘master trope,’ irony, will be dropped, as its character is very different from that of the three basic tropes. In contrast to metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, irony is much more heterogeneous. It often involves the prosodic, gestural, or facial-expressive dimension of language, which enables one to recognize that what has been said is not to be taken literally, but ironically. To explicate the complex character of irony would go beyond the scope of this introductory article. In addition, in the present context, for reasons of limited space, no attention can be paid to other linguistic occurrences traditionally also apostrophized as ‘tropes.’ Periphrasis, litotes, hyperbole, and emphasis are – as is irony – much more heterogeneous than metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. As rhetorical phenomena, they do often derive from the three basic tropes or manifest themselves in manifold tropic ways. Periphrasis, for instance, can linguistically be realized as antonomasia (which is characterized as a descriptive phrase standing for an individual to be identified with a proper name or, conversely, as a proper name standing for a general character trait), synecdoche, etymology (which is based on the principle of ‘nomen est omen’), metaphor, allegory, metonymy, euphemism, descriptio and definitio, and so forth (Plett, 2001: 91). However, some of these other ‘tropes’ frequently involve linguistic dimensions that are not genuinely related to tropes, such as the so-called ‘trope of emphasis,’ for example, which comprises numerous phonological, morphosemantic, and syntactic characteristics that are not to be seen as tropic qualities (Reisigl, 1999: 197–199). To take into consideration all these various aspects and their complex interplay would be beyond the scope of this overview. Metaphors

Of all tropes, metaphors certainly receive the most attention in the analysis of political discourses. Many studies have been carried out in the last decades

that focus on metaphorical speech in different political and historical contexts (cf., among many others, Lakoff, 1991, 1992; Chilton & Ilyin, 1993; Chilton & Lakoff, 1995; Scha¨ ffner, 1995, 2002; Chilton, 1996; Semino & Masci, 1996; Bo¨ ke, 1997, 2002; Musolff, 2000; El Refaie, 2001; Klein, 2002; Panagl & Stu¨ rmer, 2002; Stu¨ rmer, 2002). Theoretically, metaphors can be understood as ‘impertinent predications’ (Ricœur, 1986), in the sense that an expression is semantically incompatible with the context of meaning in which the expression is uttered. Metaphor establishes a similarity between two different semantic domains. As it ‘‘is a device for seeing something in terms of something else’’ (Burke, 1969: 503), it is most closely connected with the question of perspectivation. Many different types of metaphor occur in political discourses. Some metaphors transform inanimate ‘objects’ into animate ones, whereas others transform animate ‘objects’ into inanimate ones. Some metaphors predicate onto animate ‘objects’ the quality of other animate ‘objects,’ whereas others predicate onto inanimate ‘objects’ the quality of other inanimate ‘objects.’ Some transform abstract entities into concrete ones that are sensually perceivable, and others merge different human senses synesthetically or into catachresis (cf. Plett, 2001: 101–104). Many metaphors in political discourses transfer aspects from the economic to the political domain, and many from the domain of private life and family life onto public life and ‘collective actors.’ Various metaphors project elements from the domains of sports onto the political domain. All these and many other metaphorical types (including those that will be mentioned in the following explications, which for the most part are also to be found in Reisigl & Wodak [2001: 58–60]), should be taken into consideration by an elaborated phenomenology of metaphors in political discourses. Personifications or anthropomorphizations are metaphors that bring together and link two different semantic fields, one with the semantic feature (human), the other bearing the semantic feature (þhuman) (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 34). Personifications are rhetorically used to give a human form, to humanize inanimate objects, abstract entities, phenomena, and ideas. They play an important role in animating imagined ‘collective subjects’ – as, for example, ‘races,’ ‘nations,’ ‘ethnicities,’ ‘states,’ ‘state unions,’ and many other political ‘collective’ actors (cf. Goodwin [1990] for the question of ‘engendered’ nations). Their apparent concreteness and vividness often invites hearers or readers to identify or to feel solidarity with or against the personified political entity.

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In addition to personifications, there are many other forms of metaphors that are important in referentially and predicationally constructing ingroups and out-groups in politics and polity, whether they are imagined as ‘races,’ ‘nations,’ ‘ethnicities,’ ‘states,’ and ‘tribes’ or as specific ‘racialized,’ ‘national,’ ‘ethnic,’ or ‘religious’ majorities or minorities. Many of these metaphors function as ‘collective symbols.’ Very often, they are simultaneously used both as metaphors and representative synecdoches (cf. Gerhard & Link, 1991: 18). In discourses about ‘races,’ ‘nations,’ and ‘ethnicities,’ these metaphors and synecdoches, but also the respective metonymies, are almost always connected with specific dychotomic, oppositional predications that can form networks of semantic isotopes that help politicians to polarize and divide the world of social actors into ‘black and white’ and into ‘good and bad.’ The most frequent and conspicuous of these predications to ‘real’ or imagined social actors and political systems that serve positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation are those of singularity/uniqueness/distinctiveness or individuality, of identity or similarity, of collectivity, of difference, of autonomy/independence, of heteronomy/dependency, of continuity, of discontinuity, of (social) inclusion, of integration, of union or unity, of (social) cohesion, of (social) exclusion, of fragmentarization, of multiplicity, and of dissolution. Apart from these rather abstract identity-related attributions realized by metaphors, ‘national,’ ‘racial,’ and ‘ethnic’ stereotypes or ‘characters’ are predicated on the basis of metaphors, relying on the collective symbolic concepts of materiality and body; of material status (e.g., the thermostatic status of ‘warm’ versus ‘cold’) and states of matter (solid, fluid, and gaseous); of material qualities like weight (‘heavy’ versus ‘light’); of spatiality, spatiodynamics, and temporality (‘fast,’ ‘fast-moving,’ ‘ephemeral,’ ‘persistent,’ ‘tenacious,’ ‘lively,’ ‘mobile,’ ‘flexible,’ ‘slowly,’ ‘inert,’ and ‘lethargic’); and of the five sensorial concepts of visuality (‘fair,’ ‘pale,’ ‘clear,’ and ‘transparent’ versus ‘dark,’ ‘gloomy’ ‘obscure’), audibility (‘harmonious’ versus ‘loud’ and ‘noisy’), tactile sensation (‘hard’ versus ‘soft’), olfactority (‘nice-smelling’ versus ‘stinking’), and taste (‘tasteful’ versus ‘tasteless’). Racializing, nationalizing, and ethnicizing metaphors of spatiality are primarily ordered around the symbolically and evaluatively loaded binary oppositions of ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ or ‘internality’ versus ‘externality,’ of ‘height/top’ and ‘up’ versus ‘bottom’ and ‘down/low,’ of ‘foundations/ profundity/ ground’ versus ‘bottomlessness,’ of ‘superficiality’ and ‘flatness’ versus ‘depth,’ of ‘center’

versus ‘periphery/margin,’ and of ‘boundary,’ ‘limit,’ and ‘extension/expansion’ and ‘spreading’ (see Mayr & Reisigl, 1998). Metaphors of ‘racial,’ ‘national,’ and ‘ethnic bodies’ and ‘materiality’ are often also derived from naturalizations; that is, from meteorologizations, geologizations, and biologizations. To the latter belong, in addition to the personifications already mentioned (both nongendered and gendered), animalizations (of both sexes) and florizations. Taking the example of German and Austrian discourses about migrants and ‘racialized,’ ‘national,’ and ‘ethnic’ minorities, the most frequent and stereotypical metaphors employed in the negative construction or identification of social actors and in the negative predicational qualification of them, of their migration, and of the alleged effects of immigration are the following (see Bo¨ ke, 1997, 2002; Gehard & Link, 1991): natural disasters: immigration/migrants as avalanches or flood disasters; dragging/hauling: illegal immigration as dragging or hauling; water: immigration/migrants as a water-course/current/ flood that has to be ‘dammed’; fire: alleged effects of immigration/conflicts between ‘racialized, ‘nationalized,’ or ‘ethnicized’ groups’ as a smoldering fire; thermostatics: effects of immigration as pressure within the pot and conflicts between ‘racialized, ‘nationalized,’ or ‘ethnicized’ groups’ as bubbling; plants and fertile soil: migration and effects of migration as transplantation/repotting,’ uprooting, (alleged) causing of social conflicts as seeding; genetic material: cultural and social traditions and ‘heritage’ as genetic material; growth/growing: increasing immigration and increasing conflicts as growing; pollution and impurity: intergroup contacts, exchanges, and relations as pollution and impurity; melting: intergroup contacts, relations, exchanges, and assimilation as melting; body: ‘racialized,’ ‘nationalized,’ ‘ethnicized’ groups are metaphorically ascribed ‘collective (racial, national, ethnicity) bodies,’ outgroups are metaphorized as ‘foreign bodies’ or alien elements; blood: immigration as bleeding white or bloodletting of the imagined ‘collective bodies,’ intergroup relations as blood impurity; disease/infection: immigration/migrants as an epidemic, intergroup contacts and relations as an infection; animals/animal-owning: immigrants/minorities as parasites, as ‘attracted like the moths to a flame,’ as herded together; war/fight/military: immigration as military activity/invasion; goods/commodities and exchange of goods: migration as import and export of workers/workforce, migrants as ‘freight’; food: ‘good/ welcome immigrants/minorities’ versus ‘bad/ unwelcome immigrants/minorities’ metaphorized as the wheat that has to be separated from the chaff;

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vehicle/boat/ship: effects of immigration as overcrowded boat; and house/building/door/gateway/ bolt: the ingroups’ (e.g., ‘national’) territory as house or building, and stopping immigration as bolting the door. All of these metaphors are employed in discourses about migrants and migration as implicit argumentation schemes (i.e., as implicit and often fallacious conclusion rules that serve to legitimise discrimination; cf. Pielenz, 1993). The persuasive function of these metaphors may be exemplified with the metaphors of avalanches and flood. The two metaphors suggest that ‘If something (e.g., immigrants) is an avalanche or flood, it should be avoided or prevented.’ The implicit argumentation function of all the above-mentioned conceptual metaphors is explicable by corresponding if-then schemes. The suggestive force of metaphors can be so strong as to motivate metaphorologists like Lakoff to contend that ‘metaphors can kill’ (Lakoff, 1991). In view of animalizing metaphors such as ‘rat,’ ‘parasite,’ and ‘vermin,’ referring to Jews during the National Socialist dictatorship, and implying that if somebody is a harmful vermin, rat, or parasite, he or she should be exterminated, such a metonymical assertion does not appear to be an exaggeration. The tension between the preservation and transformation of political order, problem-solving, and power relations becomes clearly manifest in the area of metaphorical language. Just to offer a few hints: static metaphors, metaphors of incorporation as well as space and container metaphors seem to be favored if questions of polity, policy, and politics are a matter of consolidation and preservation, whereas destructive and (re)building metaphors, as well as dynamic metaphors (e.g., metaphors of movement and journey), indicate (intended) political transformation. Metaphors with negative connotations implying standstill are employed to evaluate preservation negatively (e.g., ‘fossilization of political structures’). Metaphors with negative connotations implying political change are employed to evaluate transformation negatively (e.g., ‘dismantling of political infrastructures’). Metonymies

Metonymies (from the Greek: ‘renaming,’ ‘name change’) are constituted by a shift involving two semantically (and materially, causally, or cognitively) adjacent fields of reference: a name of a referent stands for the name of another referent, which semantically (abstractly or concretely) adjoins the referent of the name (cf. Morier, 1989: 749–799; Lausberg, 1996: 292–295; Groddeck, 1995: 233–248; Plett, 2001: 98–100).

Depending on the relationship between the two neighboring conceptual fields, one can, among other things, distinguish between the following metonymies: (1) the name of a product or effect stands for the cause or author/creator (‘The racist book [standing for its author] provoked many enraged reactions.’); (2) the name of a cause or author/creator stands for the product or effect (‘The new Clinton [standing for the new book authored by Clinton] is a best-seller.’); (3) the name of an object stands for the user of the object (‘The cars [standing for their drivers] pollute and endanger the environment more and more.’); (4) the name of a container stands for the container’s content (‘Bush used to drink several glasses [standing for the alcoholic liquid the glasses were filled with] every day.’); (5) the name of a place (e.g., a state/country, town, city, district, or village) stands for the person or persons living at the place (‘Italy is not willing to accept more refugees.’; ‘Haider says what Austria thinks.’); (6) the name of a building stands for the person or persons staying, working, imprisoned, and so forth, there (‘The White House decided to attack Iraq.’; ‘The concentration camp Dachau was liberated in 1945 on May 2nd.’); (7) the name of a place stands for an action performed at the place or an event located at the place (‘Auschwitz must never ever happen again.’); (8) the name of a person stands for the country or state in which the person is living (‘Cooperation is important because we are too small to allow disharmony in vital areas of our country.’, as the former Austrian foreign minister, Wolfgang Schu¨ ssel, said on 15 May 1995, in his speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the international ‘Austrian State Treaty.’); (9) the name of a person or of a group of persons who have lived in the past stands for a person or a group of persons who are living in the present (‘We already fought against Prussians’ imperialism centuries ago.’); (10) the name of a time, time period, or epoch stands for the persons living in the time, time period, or epoch (‘The twentieth century has seen the most extreme political developments in human history.’); (11) the name of an institution stands for (responsible) representatives of the institution (‘The government proposes a more restrictive asylum act.’); (12) the name of an institution stands for actions performed within the institution or events that take place in the institution (‘The Second Austrian Republic has almost always been described as a history of successes.’); and so on. As one can see from examples 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12, metonymies enable speakers and writers within all of three political dimensions to conjure away responsible, involved, or affected actors (whether victims or perpetrators) or to keep them in

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the semantic background. Example 9 illustrates how a nationalist identification with the past manifests itself by the usage of the ‘historical we.’ Example 2 realizes the strategy of metonymic personalization, which aims to stress the focus on a single politician. Example 8 illustrates the strategy of metonymic concretizing and personifying (please note the doubled tropic membership) that aims to promote political identification and solidarity. Example 4 finally shows a very conventional type of metonymy, which in the specific context, could also be read as euphemistic circumlocution of Bush’s former alcoholism. Metonymies of the type ‘place name for persons’ seem to be among the most frequent ones in political discourses. They often realize the strategy of presupposing intragroup or intra-‘collective’ sameness or similarity (see Wodak et al., 1999: 43). Such an assimilating or homogenizing function is, however, also fulfilled by synecdoches and specific metaphors. Synecdoches

Synecdoches (from the Greek: ‘understanding one thing with another’) are turns of meaning within one and the same semantic field: a term is represented by another term, the extension of which is either semantically wider or semantically narrower (cf. Morier, 1989: 1159–1175; Lausberg, 1990b: 295–298; Zimmermann, 1989; Groddeck, 1995: 205–220; Plett, 2001: 92–94). According to the direction of representation, two types of synecdoches are distinguished (cf. Plett, 2001: 92–94). The particularizing synecdoche is constituted by a representative relation that consists of a semantically broader concept standing for a semantically narrower concept. The three main subcategories of this type of synecdoches are pars pro toto (i.e., the part stands for the whole: ‘Hitler [representing Nazi Germany] was finally defeated.’), singularis pro plurale (i.e., the singular stands for the plural, forms a ‘collective singular’: ‘The Swiss is industrious.’), and species pro genus (i.e., the species stands for the genus: ‘The refugee doesn’t have a penny to her name [’penny’ stands for ‘money’].’). The generalizing synecdoche is established by a semantically broader concept that represents a semantically narrower one. The three principal subcategories of generalising synecdoches are totum pro parte (i.e., the whole stands for the part: ‘Denmark is world champion.’ [this synecdoche is also a metonymy]), pluralis pro singulare (i.e., the plural stands for the singular: ‘We [representing a single person like

a queen or a state’s president; cf. pluralis maestatis or pluralis modestiae] hereby enact a general amnesty.’), and genus pro specie (i.e., the genus stands for the species: ‘Mankind has not learnt anything from history.’). In political discourses, the particularizing synecdoche, just like the generalizing synecdoche, is a means of referential annexation, assimilation, and inclusion. Particularizing synecdoches like the ‘foreigner,’ the ‘Jew,’ and the ‘American’ serve stereotypical generalization and essentialization, which refer in a leveling manner to a whole group of persons. In languages like German, Italian, and French, these are almost always realized in their masculine grammatical form. Lakoff & Johnson (1980: 38) have introduced – as a special conceptual synecdoche – the synecdoche of the ‘controller for controlled’ type –, in which leaders, people in power, rulers, and so on stand for the persons who are actually carrying out an action (e.g. ‘Bush bombarded Baghdad.’; see also the first synecdoche example). The use of this form of particularizing synecdoche is a central feature of all ‘monumentalist historiography’ (Nietzsche, 1985) that hides social actors behind their leaders if speakers and writers judge them to be historically insignificant. Even if one does not assume, as do Lakoff and Johnson (1980), that the synecdoche is a special form of metonymy, it seems equally plausible to allocate the type ‘controller for controlled’ to the category of metonymy. The crucial role of synecdoches in polity, policy, and politics has not yet been recognized adequately, even though there are first attempts to grasp the political relevance of this trope (see, for instance, Palonen [1995], who analyses party names like ‘The Greens’ as synecdoches), and even though Kenneth Burke stated more than 35 years ago that every act of social representation and every theory of political representation involves the trope of synecdoche, if ‘‘some part of the social body (either traditionally established, or elected, or coming into authority by revolution) is held to be ‘representative’ of the society as a whole’’ (Burke, 1969: 508). Burke’s observation may serve as a starting point for a general conceptualization of the relationship between synecdoche and political representation. Synecdochic representation is a basic political principle wherever more stands for less, or less stands for more. Several factors determine whether or in what way a political system of representation is organized democratically: Who is entitled to be a political representative, and who decides on the question of who

604 Rhetorical Tropes in Political Discourse

will be a representative (active and passive right to vote)? What does the procedure of political authorization to be a representative look like (direct or indirect democracy)? Under which conditions and when can the relationship of representation be dissolved or confirmed (representation for a set time)? To what extent are representatives bound to those who are represented (free or imperative mandate)? There are different levels of political representation, which can be differentiated when looking at political systems. On the highest level, there are to be found, according to the political system, imperators, kings and queens (monarchy), states’ presidents and chancellors (republic and democracy), or dictators (totalitarian dictatorship). Depending on the level of representation, one and the same politician is more or less representative. That is to say, at a lower level of integration, a politician (e.g., a party leader) may represent all members of a specific group or political organization, whereas she or he just represents a minority at a higher level of the system (e.g., in the case that the party is a very small one). These dynamics become very complex in modern democracies, and all the above-mentioned determinants have to be taken into consideration by a tropological model of political representation (for more details, see Reisigl, 2003: 252–258). Until now, an elaborated tropology of the political does not yet exist, although a developed politolinguistic theory of tropes that scientifically and fruitfully connects rhetoric, linguistic discourse analysis, and political science is an urgent desideratum. Only such a transdisciplinarian approach is capable of systematizing and explaining the many different political and linguistic functions of tropic language in polity, policy, and politics in a differentiated way that does justice to the complex topic in question. See also: Cognitive Science: Overview; Concepts; Creativ-

ity in Language; Figures of Speech; Irony; Metonymy; Rhetoric, Classical; Thought and Language: Philosophical Aspects.

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