Designing the Welfare State: Selected Building Metaphors of the Welfare State across the British Press
Designing the Welfare State: Selected Building Metaphors of the Welfare State across the British Press

Summary/Abstract: This paper, drawing on insights from discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis and applying Conceptual Metaphor theory, examines selected BUILDING metaphors of the welfare state in a corpus of four British newspapers. The paper compares the use of these metaphors in the four newspapers and considers their argumentative function, finding that while the metaphors largely overlap between the newspapers, their argumentative functions are more though not completely distinct, legitimising government reforms of the welfare state in the conservative newspapers, with the left-leaning newspapers using them to support and oppose these reforms.

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