ANDREAS MUSOLFF
Metaphor Framing in Political Discourse
This paper analyses applications of "framing" theory to figurative political discourse. It reviews in detail Lakoff et al.'s Cognitive approach, which has been the main paradigm for metaphor framing studies in the last decades and highlights its objectives, advantages and limitations. Specific attention is paid to the relationship with Fillmore's "Frame" theory developed in the 1970s. By going back to this source, the crucial issue of framing reception, i.e. the difference between frame activation and frame acceptance is made salient. The third part provides a case study illustrating this difference by charting the discourse history of the metaphorical slogan 'Britain at the heart of Europe', which was widely accepted at its launch as framing UK policy but lost acceptance over the course of three decades (whilst retaining its potential for activation). In conclusion, it is argued that receptive acceptance is the product of enriching schematic frames to rhetorically and pragmatically elaborated scenarios.