What is it about?
The contemporary landscape of metaphor studies features a range of theoretical approaches and methodologies. Al-Shboul’s monograph The Politics in Climate Change Metaphors in the U.S. Discourse proposes Metaphor Feeding Theory to investigate climate change metaphors in U.S. politics. The book aims to provide an in-depth theoretical explanation of metaphor perception and to reveal the politics of climate change metaphors in the U.S. context. Guided by the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and ecolinguistics, and combining the methods of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) with Corpus Linguistics, Al-Shboul’s research mainly contributes to the studies of metaphor cognitive analysis.
Why is it important?
Overall, the book develops metaphor theory by Metaphor Feeding Theory. The book proposes metaphor opposition theory and integrates it with the established Lakoff and Johnson’s Mapping Theory (1980) through the notion of feeding to build Metaphor Feeding Theory. At the cognitive level, mapping explains how people perceive a reality constructed by metaphors, whereas metaphor opposition interprets how people can be motivated by metaphors to act. Mapping and opposition are complementary in metaphor perception as one feeds the other.