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Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse Veronika Koller Discourse Society 2005; 16; 199 DOI: 10.1177/0957926505049621 The online version of this article can be found at: http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/2/199

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Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse

V E RO N I K A KO L L E R

Discourse & Society Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 16(2): 199–224 10.1177/ 0957926505049621

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

A B S T R A C T . This article aims at reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. By contrast, cognitive metaphor research has recently developed to emphasize the embodied, i.e. neural, origins of metaphor at the expense of its sociodiscursive impact. This article takes up the concept of social cognition, arguing that it organizes the modification of, and access to, cognitive resources, with metaphoric models playing a particularly salient role in the constitution of ideology. In a cyclical process, ideology will help particular models gain prominence in discourse, which will, in turn, impact on cognition. To illustrate the point, the article draws on an extensive corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions, showing how that particular discourse centres on an ideologically vested metaphoric model of evolutionary struggle. KEY WORDS:

business media discourse, CDA, cognitive linguistics, metaphor, social

cognition

1. Introduction The relationship between cognitive linguistics and CDA is an uneasy one. Whereas the latter is ‘primarily interested [in] and motivated by pressing social issues’ (van Dijk, 1993: 252) and the way discourse serves to constitute, negotiate and subvert such issues, mainstream cognitive linguistics, including cognitive metaphor research, has developed to focus on the human neural make-up as it impacts on language and cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Perhaps in an attempt to be acknowledged as a prestigious ‘hard’ science, cognitive linguistics has tended to pay little attention to the sociocultural situatedness of cognition or its links to discourse. By limiting itself thus, the discipline seems to represent the very decontextualization and naturalization of ideologically loaded phenomena


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that CDA seeks to unveil and hence reverse. In short, recent developments in cognitive metaphor theory make it seem an anathema to critical approaches to language. Yet, cognitive linguists’ reluctance to heed the claim that ‘the study of . . . cognition should take place within its natural context of interaction and communication’ (Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 166) is mirrored in CDA hesitating to address cognitive issues. Indeed, van Dijk’s (1993 and elsewhere) view of social cognition as a central parameter of any critical analysis of discourse has not been met with widespread application either. However, a contrary, integrating trend also seems to be under way (see Dirven et al., 2003). In this article, I argue that there is indeed common ground shared by cognitive and critical approaches to discourse and language and that the two could therefore gain considerably from each other. In the following, I discuss social cognition as the interface between conceptual models, especially metaphoric ones, on the one hand, and discourse, on the other hand, thus attempting to establish a framework for critical research into the cognitive phenomena witnessed in discourse. To illustrate my point, I present evidence from a 160,000+ corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions (M&A), showing that this particular discourse is organized around a conceptual metaphor of evolutionary struggle, as represented by expressions such as survive consolidation (Reed and Matlack, 2000), mating for survival (O’Connell, 2002) or to be gobbled up [by a company] (Reed and Matlack, 2000). By way of conclusion, I discuss the sociocognitive impact of this particular discourse feature. First, however, let us see how far the claim concerning the common interests of CDA and cognitive linguistics can be substantiated.

2. Integrating CDA and cognitive metaphor research Although some recent developments in metaphor research (Grady, 1997; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) very much background the sociocultural determinants and effects of cognitive models, the early days of cognitive metaphor theory reveal a somewhat different picture. To begin with, Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 156) observe that metaphors [. . .] highlight and make coherent certain aspects of our experience [. . .] metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action [. . .] this will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

This quotation does nothing short of applying one of the central claims of CDA to metaphor: as discourse is embedded in sociocultural practice, it constructs this context from a particular perspective and is, in turn, constructed by it. The same holds true for the instantiations of discourse in texts and the linguistic features they draw upon, e.g. metaphoric expressions.1 Further, Lakoff and Johnson state that such selective representation is motivated by intentions, in the sense that ‘people in power get to impose their metaphors’ (1980: 157). If we consider


Koller: CDA and social cognition

discourse and, by extension, metaphor as constitutive of sociocultural relations, one of the clearest manifestations of power is the possibility to control discourse and hence cognition, e.g. by ‘a coherent network of [metaphoric] entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 157). The empirical analysis will show how such metaphoric entailment is reflected in chains across texts. It is this early, rather critical approach to the social and cognitive aspects of metaphor that led Eubanks (2000: 25) to rightly state that the ‘connection between the cognitive and the cultural is the greatest strength of cognitive metaphor theory’. However, critical views on sociocultural aspects of metaphor seem to have waned significantly in cognitive semantics; although the notion of metaphor being socioculturally grounded never quite disappears in the literature, it seems to be pushed to the background. This development continues in more recent cognitive accounts of metaphor. Whereas Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 156–63) still elaborate on the reasons why metaphors are used for selective representation, Grady et al. (1999: para. 33) state only that ‘what started out [. . .] as some individual’s [. . .] conceptual achievement has become a shared, entrenched conceptualization, presumably because [it] proved successful for some purpose’ (1999: para. 72). Yet, what exactly that purpose might be is not included in the authors’ summary of cognitive metaphor theory’s agenda. Thus, integrated critical and cognitive research into metaphor is also ‘an area that warrants much greater exploration’ (Eubanks, 2000: 25). Clearly, investigating the origins and structures of metaphor, but not the effects and purposes of metaphor usage is only half the story, and approaches like the neurobiological theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) run the risk of reductionism when applied to the generation of complex metaphors. Although the liberty in using primary metaphors such as MORE IS UP (see later) may indeed be severely restricted by physical factors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 47), it is doubtful whether complex metaphoric concepts, too, are really nothing but the inevitable entailments of embodied primary metaphors. Rather, the sociocultural constraints operating on the generation of complex metaphors should also be taken into account.2 Another crucial question is that of how much freedom text producers have when it comes to metaphor usage, another issue not tackled by Lakoff and Johnson (1999). The potential for ideological critique held by cognitive metaphor theory is thus not realized. By contrast, the cognitive underpinnings of discourse are rarely addressed in CDA. Accounts of metaphor in the field are parsimonious and mostly refer to metaphoric expressions as a lexical or even rhetorical device rather than to conceptual metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon (e.g. van Dijk, 1998: 45). True, Fairclough’s observation that metaphor can be attached to ideology, rendering the ‘relationship between alternative metaphors [one] of particular interest’ (1989: 119), would be amenable to an integrated theory of metaphor in discourse. Yet, his announcement to focus on ‘relatively superficial linguistic features of vocabulary and metaphor’ (Fairclough, 1995: 70) in an instance of


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text analysis seems to indicate that Fairclough, too, emphasizes the linguistic realization of metaphor rather than its cognitive force. However, he does mention dominant metaphors as constructing domains ‘in a way which helps to marginalize other constructions from the perspective of oppositional groups’ (1995: 71–2). This statement is very much in line with Kress’ (1989) notion of metaphor as an indicator of discursive and, by extension, sociocultural struggle. Kress is also among the few to acknowledge that metaphor is ubiquitous and essential in both linguistic and cognitive activity. It should come as no surprise that there is some overlap between early cognitive metaphor theory and Critical Linguistics, as both were developed around the same time. Still, Kress’ account of metaphor is the exception rather than the rule, and subsequent mentions in CDA have been little more than just that. Hence, theoretical integration of metaphor into critical approaches to discourse and vice versa is rather marginal and often incomplete. Having said that, headway has been made in empirical analyses of metaphor especially in political discourse, if not in large-scale theory-building. Although some of the research is more cognitively oriented (Henderson, 1994; Read et al., 1990), other work focuses on the ideological and sociocultural function of metaphor (Akioye, 1994; Howe, 1988; Montgomery et al., 1989; Wilson, 1992). Still other contributions employ the cognitive theory of metaphor to unravel ideological implications (Chilton, 1996; Chilton and Ilyin, 1993; Chilton and Lakoff, 1995; Zinken, 2003). It is this last approach which this article intends to enrich by proposing a framework in which the ideological function of metaphor is seen as both a cognitive and a social phenomenon. This framework combines elements of both cognitive semantics and CDA. From the former, it takes up the notion that primary metaphors are embodied during the so-called conflation phase (Johnson, 1999), in which subjective and sensorimotor experiences are not yet differentiated, thus giving rise to persistent metaphoric concepts like MORE IS UP or CLOSENESS IS WARMTH. The notion of embodied primary metaphors contradicts radical constructivist claims like Fairclough’s that ‘any aspect of experience can be represented in terms of any number of metaphors’ (1989: 119). Further, complex metaphors are here seen as gained by combining primary ones (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). The pool of complex metaphors thus achieved is the cognitive counterpart to a more discourse-oriented ‘interpretative repertoire’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987) and as such a resource text producers can draw upon. This pool can be enlarged by adding new complex metaphors, and the ones already in it can, moreover, be recombined in secondary and further assembling processes. This recombination can also take the form of joining previously neglected semantic components to realize the full potential of metaphoric entailments. However, combining primary into complex metaphors or any subsequent combinations of complex metaphors is not free of constraints. Nor are text producers likely to have unlimited access to their pool of complex metaphors. Restrictions on these processes of recombining and selecting are captured by the concept of social cognition.



Social cognition, which first developed as a branch of social psychology in the early 1970s, represents the application of central concepts from cognitive psychology to the question of how individuals make sense of themselves and others. As such, it covers issues like categorization, attribution, self-schemata, scripts and memory as well as the relationship between cognition and affect, to name only the most central ones. Originally poised to counter the behaviourist mainstream in American psychology, social cognition introduced the individual as a thinking organism between stimulus and response, and interprets social behaviour as functionally related to cognitive perception (Fiske and Taylor, 1991). While theorists in that tradition claim to have ‘at least some concern with real-world social issues’ (Fiske and Taylor, 1991: 14), it has to be noted that early social cognition research underdelivered on those concerns in at least two respects. First, the ‘real-world social issues’ covered overwhelmingly pertain to gender or ethnicity, addressing phenomena of internalized in-group devaluation and sexist or racist stereotyping. Although these two parameters are undoubtedly of great importance and entail pressing social problems, equally important issues like, say, homophobia or discrimination against disabled people, are addressed only in passing, if at all. Second, a discussion of the role culture plays in social behaviour and of its interrelations with cognition is almost conspicuous by its absence. Moreover, most experiments were conducted under laboratory conditions with US college students as subjects – a very specific subculture indeed. Consequently, results, although valuable, can hardly claim to represent the way ‘people’ as such perceive their social world and act in it. For instance, Fiske and Taylor’s (1991) observation that test persons tend to describe themselves predominantly in dynamic terms and as acting on their own rather than as interacting most likely reflects the western and late capitalist values of dynamic activity and unbridled individualism. Yet, no mention is made of how such sociocultural and socioeconomic factors may have determined the elicited behaviour. (A recent modification of this self-centred approach is Kunda’s discussion of social cognition phenomena in western as opposed to Asian societies; Kunda, 1999.) Accordingly, classical social cognition research has been criticized for its overly individualist form of ‘unabashed mentalism’ (Fiske and Taylor, 1991: 14). In their overview article on discourse and social cognition, Condor and Antaki (1997) identify a second strand in social cognition, represented by the theories of social identity (Tajfel, 1981) and social representations (Moscovici, 2000), on the one hand, and discourse-oriented approaches to social cognition, on the other hand (Billig, 1991; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Positing that ‘the social is forever and always reproduced within the individual’ (Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 99), social identity theory in particular focuses on the reciprocal relation between self- and group-schemata, thus approximating an important topic in CDA, namely the constitution and reproduction of in-group versus out-group in discourse. However, the processes by which those distinctions, as well as the discrimination they often entail, are legitimized as ‘natural’ and as ‘common sense’ is rather addressed by the work on social representations and their ideological


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underpinnings. In contrast to schemas, social representations, i.e. the cognitive structures jointly held by members of a particular group, are theorized to be the subject of ‘continual renegotiation [. . .] during the course of social interaction and communication’ (Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 178). From a cognitive, discourse analytical viewpoint, such renegotiation is effected through intertextual chains, in which the respective representations are recontextualized and possibly enforced in discourse. Further, social representations are said to provide ‘a shared frame of reference so that communication can take place’ at all, i.e. make available the assumed shared background knowledge – Habermas’ (1981) lifeworld (Lebenswelt) – that tends to become naturalized as ‘common sense’ in hegemonic discourses. In this context, Rothbart and Taylor’s (1992) observation that social categories tend to be viewed in an essentialist fashion as homogeneous and unalterable is crucial and will be taken up again when discussing the dominant and naturalizing EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor in media discourse on a particular social practice, namely M&A. Finally, social representations can be seen as establishing social identies and relationships by being communicated (Augoustinos and Walker, 1995). In short, they fulfil both an ideational and an interpersonal function in the Hallidayan sense and thus lend themselves very well to incorporation into a CDA framework. Starting from the assumption that hegemonic power often takes the form of controlling people’s minds (van Dijk, 1993, 1997), social cognition here refers to the mental models structuring ideologies. Such models are acquired and (re)produced through social, including discursive, practices and interact with the personal cognition of group members. Cognitively structured ideologies provide group cohesion by defining membership in a group as well as its tasks/activities, goals, norms/values, position and resources (van Dijk, 1995). More often than not, these different representations are structured metaphorically. For instance, membership with its entailing notion of in-groups and out-groups is conceptualized by the primary CONTAINER metaphor. Both tasks/activities and goals can be represented as trajectories (as in ‘business school graduates [. . .] have been heading for dotcoms’; Pretzlik, 2000), while position may be defined by a number of different spatial metaphors (e.g. ‘two of the world’s drug titans are facing off in a war for dominance’; Clifford, 2000: 84). One of the factors influencing the strength of social cognition is discourse access, e.g. access to a variety of business publications representing the same corporate behaviour by drawing on different (metaphoric) models. However, discourse participants may find themselves in a situation in which they do not have access to either alternative discourses or ‘the mental resources to oppose [. . .] persuasive messages’ (van Dijk, 1996: 85). Such a situation will then lead to the emergence of preferred models. If social cognition controls mental models through discourse, widely shared preferred (i.e. hegemonic) models lend cohesion to a group’s beliefs and thus help to predict group members’ actions. Further, such ideological mental models also have a social function in that they support existing power relations, which are often asymmetric in nature.



Frequent recombinations of cognitive resources obviously bring about an increasing degree of hybridity. On the level of discourse, instances of discourse in action are often marked by such hybridity; indeed, ‘hybridity is an irreducible characteristic of complex modern discourse’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 59). At the level of semantics, hybridity could, for example, be indicated by metaphor clusters.3 An example would be the phrase ‘she did some serious housekeeping and bolstered the morale of the troops’ (‘Risky Business’, 2001: para. 7), which combines the diametrically opposed domains of WAR and HOUSEKEEPING within the comparatively small unit of the sentence. Such clustering indicates a fluctuating, dissenting discourse; it is apparently no longer self-explanatory how women in business should be conceptualized metaphorically. In a critical cognitive perspective, increased heterogeneity thus signals struggle about conceptualizations. However, although clusters certainly indicate hybridity, not every co-occurrence of different metaphors necessarily signals conflicting discourses. Different metaphors can show complex coherence and thus reinforce a particular concept, as, for example, in the case of DANCING and MATING metaphors (e.g. ‘the Asian automotive world’s latest mating dance’; Thornton, 2000). In fact, hybridity can be used to either subvert or reproduce existing power relations (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999), depending on who uses it to what ends under what circumstances. Apart from metaphoric hybridization on the interdiscursive level, metaphoric shifts may also occur within the boundaries of a discourse. This is made possible by complex metaphors being recombined to enlarge the pool of cognitive resources. Vaster cognitive resources obviously lead to broadened linguistic resources as well, which, in turn, bring about hybrid genres and texts. The upshot is a very complex web of both internal and cross-boundary metaphoric mixing, active at the level of not only discourse, but also of genre and text. In practice, however, mixing is often restrained by ideology manifested in cognition as well as in discourses and the genres and text features they favour. Although there may be idiosyncratic cases coherent only in a producer’s personal cognition, it seems likely that most metaphor clusters are informed by social cognition (see Emanatian, 2000). This explains why increasing intertextuality and hybridity do not necessarily translate into enlarged discursive resources. Power and control, active in particular contexts, restrict hybridity by enabling text producers to mix some texts, genres, discourses and, I would add, metaphors, but not others (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). Moreover, some discourses are, to a large extent, defined by the commentary on them. Examples are cabinet or boardroom meetings, about which the public is exclusively informed through the media. In a Foucauldian framework (Foucault, 1972), commentary is an internal constraint on discourse that works by means of interpretation. Commentary constitutes a secondary text which acts as a lens through which the primary one is simultaneously reified and modified. In the case of corporate discourse, communication between the inner circle of the corporate elite and more or less peripheral constituencies (employees,


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shareholders, customers, the general public) is controlled through channels such as appraisal sessions, annual reports, sales letters or interviews. With regard to the last channel, it has to be noted that the relation between primary corporate discourse and the secondary business media discourse is highly complex.4 Corporate elites redouble their economic and political power by having preferential access to journalists and being able to control the setting (e.g. press briefing), participants (e.g. only journalists accredited by the corporation),5 turn allocation and sequencing (e.g. declining to take more questions) and topics (see van Dijk, 1996: 89 for these and other criteria of access). Although journalists can, depending on their relative power, decide whom to quote in what context, they may be restricted even in this decision as the resources they have access to have been funnelled already to reflect the view of the original text producers (Jacobs, 1999). Journalists can thus – more or less involuntarily – help in conveying a particular corporate image (van Dijk, 1997). The third group of participants, the recipients of media texts, is even further removed from primary corporate discourse, and see corporate discourse only through the additional lens of the media. Business journalists (re)producing the metaphoric expressions abounding in business can exclude readers who do not share the underlying concepts, and they are thus in a position to establish out-groups. Accordingly, readers are positioned mainly as consumers and their power is restricted to meaning construction in reading and ‘modest forms of counter-power’ (van Dijk, 1993: 256), like letters to the editor or phone-in programmes. As a result, media communication is monologic rather than dialogic (Fairclough, 1995). To sum up, the claim that ‘it is [. . .] metaphors rather than statements which determine most of our [. . .] convictions’ (Rorty, 1979: 12), makes metaphor particularly salient in the context of social cognition. In particular, metaphoric expressions are a valuable starting point to study cognitive and ideological determinants of discourse. Thanks to the ubiquity of underlying conceptual metaphors, the metaphoric expressions that derive from them account for much of the cognitive construction of social relations. What is more, their function of highlighting and hiding particular semantic features makes it possible to trace ideologically vested choices in the generation and usage of complex metaphors. Metaphor thus not only proves to be an interface between the cognitive structure underlying a discourse, on the one hand, and the ideology permeating it, on the other hand. Metaphor also, as it is realized in surface-level metaphoric expressions, links discourse and its manifestation in text. It follows that any discourse is cognitively structured by the metaphors prevailing in the respective discourse domain. At the micro-level, texts are structured by the metaphoric expressions deriving from those prevailing metaphors. As such, metaphoric expressions may help to reify cognitive models governing discourse, and underlying metaphors may partly determine the surface structure of text. In the secondary domain of the media, the impact of ideology could mean that ‘reporters bring [particular metaphoric models] to bear in interpreting events and source texts, models which [they] try to convey to audiences in the way they



write’ (Fairclough, 1995: 30). In a circular fashion, these texts will serve as the starting point for new intertextual chains, each reifying and conventionalizing a particular conceptual metaphor. By virtue of ideology’s double – social and cognitive – function, it can be considered ‘the “interface” between the cognitive representations and processes underlying discourse and action, on the one hand, and the societal position and interests of social groups, on the other hand’ (van Dijk, 1995: 18). Any account of discourse and its features, e.g. metaphor, therefore, needs to integrate the two functions. Contrary to the view held by ‘discourse idealists’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 28), social life is not a product of discourse but rather a product of cognition, which is, in turn, reflected in discourse. It follows that the study of discourse alone, albeit indispensable to a critical approach, will not suffice to fully explain the workings of ideology. By contrast, looking at the cognitive aspects of ideology as conveyed in discourse should not result in a disregard for its social functions. A balanced framework will account for ideology ‘also, but not exclusively, in terms of mental representations’ (van Dijk, 1998: 22; original emphasis). The aim of the later metaphor analysis is to contribute to such an integrated account of ideology. A framework incorporating social cognition locates metaphor at the interface between the cognitive and the social and explores its origins in, and effects on, both. In short, such an approach acknowledges that ‘conceptual metaphor is a shared cognitive, cultural resource’ (Eubanks, 2000: 21).

3. Business media discourse on mergers and acquisitions: metaphors of evolutionary struggle 3.1

CORPUS AND METHOD

The empirical evidence for the earlier theoretical claims is based on a purposebuilt, machine-readable corpus of 164,509 words of magazine and newspaper texts on mergers and acquisitions (M&A). All texts were published between 1997 and 2000 and originate from four publications, Business Week, the Economist, Fortune and the Financial Times, with each of the four contributing roughly a quarter to the corpus. It is important to note that readership demographics for all publications not only show that a majority of readers hold senior management positions, but also that about 90 percent of all readers are indeed male. Owing to the size of the text collection, the analysis was partly computerassisted, using the corcordance program of WordSmith Tools 3.0. It is important to note that I did not look for each and every metaphor in the texts but only for the ones previous knowledge of M&A media discourse, anecdotal evidence from specific texts and relevant thesauri and glossaries suggested to be central, in this case the above-mentioned EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor and its sub-metaphors. The quantitative part of the analysis was accordingly based on three lexical fields of equal size, each containing 35 lexemes split up into 105 lemmas from the domains of fighting, mating and feeding (e.g. battle as subdivided into battle, to


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battle, embattled). Obviously, this approach cannot be fully operationalized and I have to admit to some inconsistencies as to what has and has not been included. Nevertheless, the fields, albeit not complete, are still comprehensive, comprising the sub-categories [+ANIMATE] and, more specifically, [+HUMAN]. For instance, fighting can be ‘humanized’ as war, yielding expressions such as ‘at the same time as battling for business they are fighting a war for talent’ (Pretzlik, 2000). Similarly, [+HUMAN] components of the mating field are found in phrases like ‘[The company] may marry its Hong Kong rival’ (Shari, 2000: 22), whereas examples of [+HUMAN] feeding are the lemmas dinner or diet. As a general rule, [+HUMAN] elements tend to be attenuating, backgrounding the more gruesome aspects of evolutionary struggle by highlighting its culturally sublimated variety. The items of the fields were subsequently run through the concordancer to see if and how often they occur in the corpus. Obviously, concordance lines were reworked manually to distinguish between literal and metaphoric occurrences. In this context, metaphor identification – always a thorny issue – relied on the criteria established by Low (1999), according to whom the presence of the following parameters suggests a conceptually entrenched metaphor: creatively extending one’s own and other people’s metaphors, making metaphor explicit, making the semantic features transferred explicit and arguing over metaphor usage with different ‘semantic overtones’ (an example of the last parameter being the following exchange between a journalist and a corporate representative: ‘Should investors fear indigestion? “We don’t digest [corporate cultures]; we integrate them,” says CFO Muller’; Chen, 2000). Going through these motions showed how many items from the lexical fields are realized metaphorically, what the absolute number of metaphoric tokens in the corpus is and what their relative figures are (see Table 1). These initial investigations sketch the breadth of the corpus and are complemented by research into its depth. To that end, four sample texts – one from each publication – showing high metaphor density were singled out. This again comprised establishing absolute and relative metaphor frequency and, beyond that, a look at how metaphoric expressions cluster in specific texts. In this context, clustering is as much about what metaphors cluster as it is about where in the text they do so. The working hypothesis in this context is that clusters serve different functions according to the textual macro-slot in which they occur. In particular, clusters at the beginning are assumed to meet a defining function (‘setting the agenda’), clusters in mid-text are seen as fulfilling an argumentative need and clusters at the end of a text are considered playing a persuasive role (‘driving a point home’). This issue of the position of clusters in the text can be addressed by using the concordancer’s so-called dispersion plot function, which provides a graphic representation of where in the text a particular search word occurs. Hence, attested metaphoric tokens were tagged manually and a second search was run for those tags and their dispersion across the article. Intended as a first visual impression of metaphor distribution, Figure 1 provides a screenshot of such a dispersion plot for the Economist sample article, detailing (from left to



overall metaphoric expressions

metaphoric expressions of ﬁghting

metaphoric expressions of mating

metaphoric expressions of feeding

FIGURE

1. Dispersion plot Economist sample text

right) file name, number of words in the article, absolute number of occurrences of the tag, number of occurrences per 1000 words and a graphic representation of tags as they occur throughout the article. In Figure 1, the first plot lists the overall number of metaphoric expressions in the sample, whereas the subsequent plots detail realizations of the FIGHTING, MATING and FEEDING metaphor, respectively. On a qualitative note, article structure is further seen as combining metaphor clusters with metaphor chains, i.e. the links between metaphoric expressions as they keep recurring throughout the text. According to Kyratzis (1997), links in such chains can exemplify, extend or elaborate on each other. While these three devices serve to intensify a given metaphor, expressions questioning or, as can be added, negating each other help attenuate the respective metaphor. What is more, it is a frequent feature of metaphoric expressions, especially very conventional ones like, for example, hostile takeover, to simply echo each other throughout an article. Thus, we not only find agglomerations of metaphoric expressions in specific parts of the text but these clusters are moreover interrelated in the form of functional semantic chains spanning the text. In this context, it is important to note that such chains are partly accounted for by metaphoric entailment, meaning that a conceptual metaphor can give rise to a range of different linguistic expressions. For instance, the MARRIAGE metaphor for corporate mergers can be realized by referring to companies holding hands or even having a promiscuous lifestyle with unusual bedfellows, although the current crop of marriage proposals may


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stop short of the altar (‘Hold My Hand’, 1999). A final question concerns the extent and status of alternative, possibly counter-discursive metaphors. Combining the earlier results, the analysis covers the metaphoric scenario that evolves in the sample text, i.e. organisms engaged in evolutionary struggle. By means of this two-step analysis, it was possible to get a handle on how central particular metaphors and metaphoric scenarios actually are and to draw inferences about the related discourse, cognitive model and socio-economic framework, to be elaborated in the discussion (Section 3.3).

3.2

ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS

In this sub-section, I first present the overall quantitative findings for the whole corpus of M&A texts. Using those figures as a starting point, I then take a qualitative look at an actual text fragment to see if and how they are reflected at the concrete textual level. This analysis is supplemented by other examples from the corpus whenever necessary. The findings are intended to illustrate the textual and contextual functions of metaphor in business media discourse on M&A. Table 1 provides some statistics on metaphor usage in the corpus. It can be seen that the lexical field of fighting shows the highest number of lexemes to be realized metaphorically. Furthermore, the FIGHTING metaphor also shows the highest overall number of metaphoric expressions in the corpus. In adddition, the metaphor is most productive in the corpus, in terms of recording, next to a plethora of entrenched expressions like hostile bid, a range of creative extensions (Clausner and Croft, 1997) such as ‘he recently pulled the trigger on a merger’ (Grant, 1997: 86). Indeed, there seems to be a correlation between the productivity of the lexical field and that of the related metaphor, as corroborated by data from media texts on marketing (Koller, 2004). All in all, general quantitative findings suggest a dominance of the FIGHTING metaphor in terms of frequency, entrenchment and productivity, with ancillary MATING and FEEDING metaphors completing the EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE cluster. Interestingly, the [+HUMAN] lemmas are over-represented in metaphoric expressions of mating, yielding a prevalence of terms such as marriage/to marry or relationship at the expense of mate or desire. By contrast, the FEEDING metaphor shows mostly [+ANIMATE], [-HUMAN] terms such as predator and prey. TA B L E

1. Metaphor usage in M&A corpus Number (percent) of lexemes realized metaphorically

Number (percent) of attested metaphoric expressions

FEEDING

34 of 35 (97.14) 23 of 35 (65.71) 16 of 35 (45.71)

482 (70.26) 138 (20.12) 66 (9.62)

Total

73 of 105 (69.52)

686 (100)

Lexical field/metaphor FIGHTING MATING



Let us now turn to a concrete example, a fragment from an Economist text (‘How Mergers Go Wrong’, 2000) to see how these quantitative features play out at the textual level. In the sample below, bold type is used to indicate a metaphoric expression of fighting, and bold italics represent one of mating. Realizations of the FEEDING metaphor are given in underlined bold type and simple italics finally denote a relevant metaphoric expression which, however, was not part of the original lexical fields. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

How mergers go wrong It is important to learn the lessons from the failures and successes of past mergers They are, like second marriages, a triumph of hope over experience. A stream of studies has shown that corporate mergers have even higher failure rates than the liaisons of Hollywood stars. One report by KPMG, a consultancy, concluded that over half of them had destroyed shareholder value, and a further third had made no difference. Yet over the past two years, companies around the globe have jumped into bed with each other on an unprecedented scale. [...] Most of the mergers we have looked at were defensive, meaning that they were initiated in part because the companies involved were under threat. Sometimes, the threat was a change in the size or nature of a particular market: McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing, for example, because its biggest customer, the Pentagon, was cutting spending by half. Occasionally the threat lay in that buzzword of today, globalisation, and its concomitant demand for greater scale: Chrysler merged with Daimler-Benz because, even as number three in the world’s largest car market, it was too small to prosper alone. Or the threat may have come from another predator: Bayerische Vereinsbank sought a merger with a Bavarian rival, Hypobank, because its management was scared of being gobbled up by Deutsche Bank. When a company merges to escape a threat, it often imports its problems into the marriage. Its new mate, in the starry moments of courtship, may find it easier to see the opportunities than the challenges. Hypobank is an egregious example: it took more than two years for Vereinsbank to discover the full horror of its partner’s balance sheet. [...] Above all, personal chemistry matters every bit as much in mergers as it does in marriage. It matters most at the top. No company can have two bosses for long. [...] Without leadership from its top manager, a company that is being bought can all too often feel like a defeated army in an occupied land, and will wage guerrilla warfare against a deal. The fact that mergers so often fail is not, of itself, a reason for companies to avoid them altogether. But it does mean that merging is never going to be a simple solution to a company’s problems. And it also suggests that it would be a good idea, before they book their weddings, if managers boned up on the experiences of those who have gone before. They might begin with our series of briefs (see article).

Although the text contains only 13 instances of cluster metaphors of evolutionary struggle, all three sub-metaphors are in fact represented. Interestingly, it can be observed that the MATING metaphor is most prominent (accounting for 53.87


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percent), relegating the FIGHTING metaphor and its four instances to second rank and all but dwarfing the FEEDING metaphor, which is realized only twice. In line with the [+HUMAN]/[+ANIMATE] distribution patterns in the corpus as a whole, it is mostly the [+HUMAN] sub-set of the MATING metaphor that has been realized in the sample at hand. The remarkable dominance of the MATING metaphor there is representative of the spread of cluster metaphors across the whole corpus. While the Economist accounts for 29.42 percent of all cluster metaphors, its percentage of the MATING metaphor is not less than 43.48 percent. Because the Financial Times is under-represented when it comes to the MATING metaphor (14.49 percent compared with 24.93 percent on the whole), its remarkable use by the Economist can hardly be regarded as culture specific. Because of the Economist’s anonymity policy it is impossible to say whether the MATING metaphor’s prominence in the publication at hand is related to its possibly genderspecific usage. However, checking the other three publications for a link between metaphoric expressions of mating and the authors’ gender reveals that there is no correlation between the two parameters. I, therefore, conclude that the Economist’s pronounced usage of the MATING metaphor is an idiosyncrasy of the magazine’s general style. As for the spread of cluster metaphors across the text, the dispersion plot (see Fig. 1) shows that clustering patterns are very clearly characterized by co-occurrences in the first half of the text, which are largely accounted for by the MATING metaphor, with small contributions from the FIGHTING and FEEDING metaphors. After that concentration, relevant metaphors are suspended in the latter half of the text, which has consequently been omitted from the earlier sample. Metaphor density in the form of the FIGHTING and MATING metaphors is subsequently renewed and intensified towards the end of the article. Some of the clustering at the article’s end is accounted for by the FIGHTING metaphor. Re-introduced in ll. 28–30, it takes a rather intensified form (‘a company that is being bought can all too often feel like a defeated army in an occupied land, and will wage guerrilla warfare against a deal’). In equating a company with its employees, the sentence combines a metaphoric expression with metonymy. Through this combination of stylistic devices, the metaphor is granted extraordinary rhetorical weight and is thus intensified towards the end of the text. However, the article closes by once more instantiating the MATING metaphor (‘before they book their weddings’ in l. 33). In this context, it becomes evident that the MATING metaphor frames the topic by being used strategically in the opening stretches of the text as well as in its closing lines, thus both defining the subject matter and persuading the reader to take this specific conceptualization on board. Let us see what functions these metaphors have in the text. The title (‘How mergers go wrong’, l. 1) conveys a pejorative attitude. As this attitude is given in the headline already, it has a strong defining function, indicating for the readers how the topic is to be evaluated. Yet, in ll. 2–3, this attitude is modified by juxtaposing ‘the failures and successes of past mergers’. The opening sentence of the article (‘They are, like second marriages, a triumph of hope over



experience’, l. 4) gives both the source (marriage) and the target (mergers) of the metaphor and also spells out the semantic features transferred. The MATING metaphor persists in ll. 5–6 (‘corporate mergers have even higher failure rates than the liaisons of Hollywood stars’). By syntactically linking the literal and the non-literal referent in the same comparative clause, the metaphor is here made explicit (Steen, 1999). As both describe the topic of the text, the first and the second sentence of the opening paragraph in fact constitute deep-level identification processes. In a defining manner, the dominant metaphoric conceptualization of mergers is thus firmly entrenched right at the beginning of the article. Afterwards, the MATING metaphor is suspended, to re-appear only in l. 22. Instead, we can witness a switch from the MATING to the hitherto absent FIGHTING metaphor, which dominates the middle part of the text, possibly serving an argumentative function. In this macro-slot, it is supplemented by the two instances of the FEEDING metaphor (‘predator’ and ‘scared of being gobbled up’ in ll. 18 and 19–20). In accordance with findings for the corpus as a whole, those two realizations, while rather conventional, draw on the unattenuated [-HUMAN] aspect of the metaphor and thus approximate the FIGHTING metaphor. The MATING metaphor re-enters the scene only in l. 22, with a cluster of relevant metaphoric expressions, among them a rather unconventional entailment (‘in the starry moments of courtship’). The salient end-slot of the article is then characterized by a persuasive cross-over of the MATING and the FIGHTING metaphor (ll. 26–33), illustrating the conceptual proximity of the two. It should be noted that the text both opens and closes with a realization of the MATING metaphor, which thus functions as a conceptual frame to the text. In the other sample texts, however, different metaphors can and do function as text frames. In Tomkins (2000), for instance, a combination of the FIGHTING and the FEEDING metaphor can be attested in those salient textual slots, thus helping to anchor this conceptualization firmly in readers’ minds (‘Dotcoms devoured: The internet shakeout is getting brutal’ and ‘a fight to the death with Yahoo!’). Other articles show no clear framing whatsoever. In any case, it need not be the quantitatively dominant FIGHTING metaphor that serves as a qualitative frame. Whereas metaphor clusters can be cross-classified as local metaphor chains, the article’s macro-structure is further characterized by more extensive chains spanning the whole text. Interestingly, the author of the Economist sample relies exclusively on intensifying – i.e. echoing, exemplifying, extending and elaborating – chains, with no instances of negating or questioning. As a matter of fact, there is little questioning and less negating of the dominant metaphors in the corpus as a whole. Journalists seem to draw mostly on their own metaphoric conceptualizations and their systematic entailments and dominant metaphors are therefore only argued about on a moderate scale between corporate representatives and journalists, for example, ‘should investors fear indigestion? “We don’t digest [acquired companies]; we integrate them” ’ (Chen, 2000: 257). Here, executives obviously feel the need to tone down metaphors perceived as too aggressive. This and similar examples in the corpus show how corporate representatives use the


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media to communicate indirectly with stakeholders, refuting metaphoric concepts they, as readers, may well hold themselves. The earlier Economist sample, however, lacks such questioning, let alone negating, focusing instead on intensifying chains. The first local chain can be witnessed in ll. 4–9, where the conventional ‘marriages’ (l. 4) is extended to novel conceptualizations such as ‘liaisons’ and ‘jumped into bed with each other’ (ll. 6 and 9). In the samples analysed for this study, echoing is mostly restricted to very conventional metaphoric expressions such as hostile and its collocates (e.g. occurring as many as 11 times throughout Swann, 2000, an 861-word article),6 and accordingly, it is the conventional metaphoric expression ‘marriage(s)’ that is echoed throughout the earlier Economist fragment (ll. 4, 22 and 27). In this way, it provides a skeletal structure which is subsequently fleshed out by means of extension (ll. 6 and 9) or elaboration (‘Its new mate, in the starry moments of courtship’ in l. 22 as well as ‘weddings’ in l. 33). In the corpus and elsewhere, entailment-based elaboration can become quite extensive. A case in point is the following metaphoric chain from another Economist article (‘French Twist?’, 2003: 58): ‘In this summer of corporate love, the unwanted embrace of Pechiney, a French aluminium company, by Alcan, its Canadian rival, could become a thorny romance’. Returning to the current fragment, a second chain centres on the FIGHTING metaphor. This is first constructed locally in ll. 10–17, with ‘threat’ serving as the main link (ll. 11, 12, 14 and 17). This echoing chain begins by establishing the notion of the ‘defensive merger’, i.e. one brought about as a reaction to a ‘threat’, and subsequently establishes a conceptual link between threat and predator (ll. 17–18). The connection between this and the second local FIGHTING metaphor chain (ll. 28–30) is looser than was the case for the MATING metaphor, as there is no echoing throughout the text. Moreover, the second local chain does not exist independently but is crossed with the third local MATING metaphor chain (ll. 27 and 33). This relative conceptual weakness once more underscores the centrality of the MATING metaphor. The weakest metaphor to appear in the article, the FEEDING metaphor, is restricted to a mini-cluster or very short local chain in ll. 18–20, where it furthermore serves to support the FIGHTING metaphor. The total lack of questioning or negating chains is mirrored by the absence of any alternative metaphors. Given the dynamic movement scenario outlined later, a DANCING metaphor referring to non-aggressive movement would seem plausible (Hirsch, 1986; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). However, such a metaphor cannot be attested in the sample text. What is more, its occurrences in the corpus as a whole are both extremely scarce (showing a total of only 20 tokens or less than 3 percent) and invariably linked to the MATING metaphor: ‘We had always thought that SDL was the beautiful prom queen standing in the middle of the dance floor without a partner,’ says analyst Jim Jungjohann of CIBC World Markets. (Chen, 2000: 257)


Koller: CDA and social cognition Jeremy Elden of Germany’s Commerzbank likens the current merger madness to ‘the rush to find a partner, any partner, at a school dance after the big boys have picked the best ones’. (‘Little Big Men’, 1999: 82) the Asian automotive world’s latest mating dance. (Thornton, 2000)

Given the social practice of ballroom dancing as a gendered activity, it should perhaps come as no surprise that metaphoric expressions relating to partner dances tie in with a male-defined mating scenario. As other instances are absent from the corpus, the DANCING metaphor is easily co-opted into a dominant model of static females being approached by active males. The model that emerges in the sample text is one of living organisms moving in a bounded space (i.e. the market) in relation to each other. While this primary metaphor as such does not tell us anything specific about the discourse at hand, its elaborations are all the more interesting and indeed revealing as far as the possible agenda of discourse participants is concerned. Metaphoric movement in the earlier sample text can have various intentions, be it destructive (fighting), unifying (mating) or incorporating (feeding). The only impossible type of movement seems to be no movement. We have already seen that the two instances of the FEEDING metaphor (ll. 18 and 20) co-construct M&A as fighting by drawing on its less refined, aggressive aspects. Less obviously perhaps, the MATING and FIGHTING metaphors are conceptually related, too. Occurring in the article in their [+HUMAN] varieties MARRIAGE and WAR, they are first linked in ll. 21–22, where metaphoric marriage is depicted as the direct result of being under threat (‘When a company merges to escape a threat, it often imports its problems into the marriage’). Here, the FIGHTING and the MATING metaphor are connected at the syntactic level by establishing a metaphoric relationship between the two. A company is depicted as moving away from one negatively evaluated fighting scenario and towards a more positively viewed mating scenario. Whatever the type of movement, it again seems that a standstill is not a viable option in the bounded space in which the market participants find themselves; a company always has to be moving in relation to one or several others, albeit with different intentions. The emergent model thus looks rather dynamic. The syntactic link is furthermore preceded by an example in ll. 18–19, in which a company seeks unification with a ‘rival’. This apparent paradox in fact constitutes the linguistic realization of the phenomenon of the ‘white knight’, i.e. a company proposing a friendly merger to another company that is being threatened with a hostile takeover. On a scale of evaluation, one originally negatively evaluated company moves towards the positive end as the most extreme end of negative evaluation becomes occupied by another company (the so-called ‘raider’ or ‘predator’). Accordingly, metaphoric movement, although still relational, changes in intent from destructive to unifying. (Such unification is interpreted sexually earlier in the article: The phrase ‘companies . . . have jumped into bed with each other’ [ll. 8–9] first establishes the


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entities involved as moving in relation to each other, coupling metaphoric movement with the specific M&A ACTIVITY IS HAVING SEX metaphor, in which the two entities do not attack but join each other in a sexual encounter.) The third option would be incorporating, as in ‘management was scared of being gobbled up’ (ll. 19–20), one of the article’s two realizations of the FEEDING metaphor. Setting up merging as an alternative to being either destroyed or incorporated and thus extinguished clearly conveys how closely related aggression and mating actually are. A very similar metaphoric scenario emerges in other articles from the corpus, with the additional feature that the bounded space that is the market is moreover subject to external pressure (government regulation, competition, etc.), causing the companies to move in relation to each other in the first place. This movement involves two stages and thus a temporal sequence; the companies first circle and watch before they attack each other, with examples including ‘U.S. telecoms are also keeping a close eye on what goes on across the Atlantic’, ‘SBC Telecommunications . . . could be eyeing deals’ (Reed and Matlack, 2000) or – from outside the corpus – ‘[f ]or 10 months the three men circled like prizefighters, lovers or vultures’ (Krantz, 1996: 62), which clearly links the aggression with the mating aspect.7 As we could see from the Economist sample, the goals of assaults are three-fold, comprising obliteration (in line with the FIGHTING metaphor), unification (MATING) or incorporation (FEEDING). Once more, it is important to note that these three metaphors, although seemingly unrelated, are in fact linked conceptually. All three represent sub-categories of an overarching EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor that naturalizes the social practice of corporate restructuring as part of an evolutionary process. This quasi-natural process is made explicit in the statement ‘it’s a natural evolution in the industry that will continue to play out’ (Tomkins, 2000). Accordingly, fighting, mating and feeding alike serve the ulterior survival motive that is conceptualized in antagonistic terms, as competition and struggle rather than cooperation and mutual benefit. Even the apparently less aggressive MATING metaphor shows a tendency to sustain this concept; marriage is seen as a defence mechanism companies can use to ‘escape a threat’ (l. 21 in the Economist fragment), thus becoming ‘victims [who] have been driven into the arms of rivals’ (Tomkins, 2000). Although the [+HUMAN] aspect of the specific MARRIAGE metaphor goes some way to attenuate any inherent aggressiveness, the relevant expressions are still found in close textual and syntactic proximity to the FIGHTING metaphor, a position contributing to their semantic vicinity as well. The following examples are a case in point: Singapore Telecom: If You Can’t Beat ’em . . . It may marry its Hong Kong rival. (Shari, 2000: 22) At a recent conference, Ron Sommer of Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s former telephone monopoly, joked that suitors in the telecoms industry now need fat chequebooks and a bunch of flowers. And if gallantry is rebuffed? Throw away the flowers and call in the tanks. (‘A Fight to the Wire’, 1999: 75)



What we are left with is a metaphoric scenario in which marriage is just one more means to the end of winning the ever-present evolutionary struggle, thus tying in with the more overly aggressive notions of fighting and feeding. The model emerging in the earlier Economist sample is supported by various means. Not only is the FIGHTING metaphor intensified towards the end of the text (ll. 28–30), but intensification also takes place in the form of hyperbolic language in connection with SIZE metaphors (e.g. ‘Titanic league’ [omitted] and terms recurring in the corpus, as in ‘the combined JDSU-SDL behemoth’ (Chen, 2000), ‘If this deal goes ahead, it will create a giant with revenues of over $60 billion’ (‘Little Big Men’, 1999: 82) or ‘valuations are astronomical’ (Reed and Matlack, 2000). Furthermore, we find INSANITY metaphors showing in collocations such as acquisition frenzy (‘It’s not acquisition frenzy; it’s a well-thought-out strategy’; Chen, 2000) or merger mania (‘the U.S. and Europe are already in the grip of merger mania’; Katz, 2000). Last, but not least, there is evidence of a HEAT metaphor reinforcing the external pressure aspect of the scenario via the embodied metaphor PRESSURE IS HEAT (e.g. ‘Prime Minister Lionel Jospin is putting the heat on France Telecom CEO’; Reed and Matlack, 2000, ‘Europe [is] the hottest merger zone of all’ [omitted in the above fragment]). Elsewhere in the corpus, we also find additional concepts reinforcing the emergent scenario, e.g. a HUNTING metaphor linking fighting and feeding, as evidenced in phrases like ‘they are hunting for acquisitions’ or ‘Former monopolies such as Deutsche Telekom [. . .] are on the prowl’ (Reed and Matlack, 2000). Beyond being granted conceptual cohesion, the scenario is thus also intensified. Indeed, intensification is a pervasive feature not only in the Economist sample but in the M&A corpus as a whole. To sum up, the underlying model (or script, given the temporal sequence involved) gains in persuasive power by being both coherent and intensified. By virtue of its comprehensive and heterogeneous nature, it also hegemonically co-opts possible alternatives such as the DANCING metaphor and is thus likely to impact on cognition and discourse quite sustainably. By presenting the readers with an intricate linkage of seemingly mutually exclusive metaphors and hardly ever questioning them by bringing in alternatives, the authors go some way to establish their model firmly in both discourse and the readers’ cognition. Let us now have a look at how these findings – metaphor frequency, article structure (comprising metaphor clusters and metaphor chains), alternative metaphors and metaphoric scenarios – impact on cognition, discourse and the wider socio-economic framework in which these are embedded.

3.3

DISCUSSION

It is clear that media discourse on M&A is very much characterized by a selecetively used cluster of FIGHTING, MATING and FEEDING metaphors, which combine into a scenario of evolutionary struggle. Within the cluster, the FIGHTING and MATING metaphors are dominant in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The scenario is also fleshed out and intensified by additional concepts such as the HUNTING or the HEAT metaphor, making for a hybrid yet coherent conceptual cluster. The


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scenario is highly persuasive as its pseudo-scientific nature ‘makes it appear factual, beyond question and as common sense’ (White and Herrera, 2003: 298). Moreover, the EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE cluster informing M&A discourse is a blatant example of the view of social categories as natural kinds, which has been attested by Rothbart and Taylor (1992). In their study, the authors show that ‘people’8 tend to perceive and reason about artifact-like social categories as if they were homogeneous natural kinds with essential properties and an ahistorical, unalterable identity. This phenomenon also shows in the conceptualization of social practices, in this case corporate restructuring; as we may see, companies involved in M&A are metaphorically represented as living organisms subjected to the natural forces of evolutionary struggle. Not only do they act according to some master plan, they also do so irrespective of contextual factors; their behaviour and, in fact, their very identity is presented as consistent and immune to change. In the words of Rothbart and Taylor, it ‘is implicit in the basic character of natural kind structures . . . that category status cannot be altered: A fish canot become a bird’ (1992: 20). (A literal illustration of this claim is once more provided by the Economist: on the cover of the issue from which the above text fragment was taken, we again find the headline ‘How mergers go wong’, placed next to the picture of a phantasmagoric creature that is half bird, half fish.) Metaphorically constructing a social practice as natural and inevitable precludes change and struggle over definitions, and by doing so, the business media imbue M&A discourse with much persuasive power. Yet, it is this very persuasiveness that betrays the ideological agenda it helps to establish. As for the discourse at hand, it could be seen that all three cluster metaphors chosen centre on aggressive movement, the goal of which is extinction of rivals by various means. Even the MATING metaphor, which at first glance seems to contradict that scenario, is instrumental in supporting it, establishing as it does marriage as something a threatened company is coerced into. Here, aggression is exclusively male and directed, in more or less attenuated ways, against a weaker company depicted as static and female.9 This aggression aspect actually links it to the other two cluster metaphors by rendering it just one more means to the same end, namely market domination. The three seemingly unrelated domains thus show conceptual parallels and can be subsumed under the heading of an EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor. And that is where that metaphor (or metaphor cluster) derives its strength from; by combining various sub-fields into a heterogeneous yet coherent model, the EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor in M&A discourse shows how ‘a schema can be differentiated hierarchically by the development of subtypes which accommodate exceptions to the schema, but . . . leave the overall schema intact’ (Augustinos and Walker, 1995: 53). Ultimately, such metaphoric entailments help to maintain a hegemonic power balance. While the EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor can be traced back to primary metaphors informed by a universal FORCE schema (Talmy, 1988), combining fighting and business is most probably an ideologically motivated choice. If we regard aggression, fighting and struggle as a masculinized domain (sociocognitively, if



not in practice), the enforced metaphoric scenario not only promotes ‘a neoliberal ideology that interprets economics as a logical extension of nature, understood in Darwinian terms’ (White and Herrrera, 2003: 292), but such selective metaphor usage and the concomitant cognitive scenario also help to (re-)establish the discourse on and social practice of M&A as a male-defined domain. By simultaneously positioning women as members of the out-group, the EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE scenario may, therefore, have very literal repercussions on female executives. Being exposed to a discourse thus characterized will (re)produce the mental models held by discourse participants. The ideal reader would share the concept either prior to his or her reception of the text or come to share it while processing the text – if it matches previous concepts, that is. Thus, readers who, due to their cognitive, discursive and social make-up already conceptualize much of their world in terms of, say, fighting, are more likely to blend those concepts with the EVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE metaphor. By contrast, a person conceptualizing his or her world in terms of dancing or talking is likely to feel alienated by abounding evidence of that metaphor. The former reader would then be part of the in-group, whereas the latter would soon find himself or, rather, herself confined to an outgroup. If we recall that 90 percent of the readers of the corpus publications are in fact male, promoting a masculinized metaphoric scenario of systematically related entailments reflects a high degree of readership orientation, if not imitation, on the part of journalists. Writers reflecting their readers’ perceived conceptual models thus root these even more deeply in discourse and cognition, making it hard for proponents of alternative metaphors like MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS (Searls and Weinberger, 2000) to establish their metaphors in business discourse. In a cognitive perspective, alternative metaphors are at a further disadvantage as they are schema-inconsistent and thus less likely to be processed and reproduced (Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 44). The dominant metaphoric scenario found in business media discourse on M&A, therefore, not only presents a particular social practice as natural and hence non-negotiable. Because of the masculinized nature of the promoted scenario, the business media furthermore help sustain this social practice as a male arena both cognitively and discursively. Given the seemingly endless cyclical process sketched earlier, the question arises in how far individuals can actually resist cognitive and hence discursive control. According to Chilton and Ilyin (1993), there are a number of ways to foster alternative metaphors. One way of subverting a dominant metaphor would be to reject it altogether and propose an alternative one (e.g. MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS instead of MARKETS ARE BATTLEFIELDS). However, it can be seen that single metaphors, like the DANCING metaphor, are easily co-opted into a dominant scenario, and it is therefore doubtful whether promoting an individual metaphor instead of a whole scenario will actually make a difference. In view of the earlier theoretical considerations, Chilton and Ilyin’s suggestion to recombine existent metaphors into new models seems a more promising approach. One such recombination is linking the well-established COMPANIES ARE ORGANISMS metaphor


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(Morgan, 1997) to a hyponymic REPRODUCTION metaphor, and products and spinoffs after mergers have indeed been metaphorized as babies in media discourse on M&A (e.g. the term Baby Bells; Kupfer, 1996: 40, see also Pieper and Hughes, 1997). Another way to enlarge and/or change the pool of cognitive resources is to re-accentuate existent complex metaphors by foregrounding hitherto neglected semantic features. Thus, the FEEDING metaphor could be altered by enforcing its [+HUMAN] sub-category, which is currently backgrounded in favour of more aggressive animal feeding. Notwithstanding the dominance of the central metaphoric scenario, there is thus still leeway for change and the ‘flamboyant language of business takeovers’ (Hirsch, 1986: 830) could be more amenable to alterations than some of its proponents would have it.

4. Closing remarks Within the scope of this article, I could only scratch the surface of a combined critical cognitive investigation into business media discourse, and much remains to be done. For instance, the study at hand does not look at genre-specific metaphor usage in any systematic way. Neither does it address the cultural or gender-related determinants of metaphor, all of which promise to broaden the understanding of how cognitive phenomena impact on discourse and social practices. However, the demand that CDA should incorporate the study of the cognitive determinants of discourse along those lines is not met with universal approval. Chouliaraki and Fairclough, albeit supporting the idea that ‘social life [is] produced in thought’ (1999: 28), claim that because cognitive phenomena cannot be studied directly, any account would necessarily be mediated. Certainly, researchers should be aware of the fact that all research on cognitive models is represented in the form of new cognitive models – just as all writing on ideology is itself ideologically vested. However, this fact should by no means be taken to preclude any further research along the lines of the present study, i.e. in the area of Critical Discourse Analysis and social cognition. NOTES

1. In accordance with one of the main tenets of cognitive metaphor theory, metaphoric expressions, such as the French [supermarket chain] withdrew from Germany in 1996 after a brief foray (‘Cheap and Cheerless’, 2000: 66), are seen as surface-level realizations of underlying conceptual metaphors, e.g. MARKETING IS ATTACKING. To distinguish between the two, the former are represented by italics while the latter are given in small capitals. 2. This view is similar to Kövecses’ (2000: 183–6) notion of ‘body-based constructionism’. However, whereas his focus is on the perceived physical constraints on cultural models, the argument is here reversed by stressing the sociocultural influences on originally embodied concepts. 3. I use the term ‘cluster’ to mean both the co-occurrence of metaphoric expressions from various domains and the semantic overlaps between those domains. 4. To complicate matters further, the media industry constitutes a realm of business in its own right (see Croteau and Hoynes, 2001).


Koller: CDA and social cognition 5. Such privileged groups of journalists can themselves become what Foucault (1972: 225) calls ‘fellowships of discourse’, i.e. close communities whose role is to preserve, reproduce and distribute discourse in a way as not to lose their own symbolic power. They are hegemonic groups in the sense of Gramsci, an in-group influencing discourse practice. 6. It is no coincidence that echoing of conventional metaphoric terms is most prominent in samples from the Financial Times: Eubanks (2000: 44) observes that conventionalized metaphors are more likely to be used in ‘quickly produced newspaper prose’. 7. Furthermore, the example nicely illustrates the homoerotic undercurrents present in homosocial settings. 8. The inclusive reference to ‘people’ in much of social cognition literature is obviously problematic (see also theory section), levelling as it does crucial differences in discursive roles and relationships. By disregarding situational factors – including the different agendas of discourse participants – in favour of general dispositions, some brands of social cognition seem to succumb to the so-called fundamental attribution error they describe so elaborately elsewhere (e.g. Kunda, 1999). 9. White and Herrera (2003) also discuss a relatively powerful feminized company as choosing from its pick of suitors. While this scenario is important as an alternative way of conceptualizing mergers, it could not be traced in the samples investigated for this study. REFERENCES

Akioye, A.A. (1994) ‘The Rhetorical Construction of Radical Africanism at the United Nations: Metaphoric Cluster as Strategy’, Discourse & Society 5: 7–31. Augoustinos, M. and Walker, I. (1995) Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction. London: Sage. Billig, M. (1991) Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology. London: Sage. ‘Cheap and Cheerless’, The Economist 2 September 2000: 65–6. Chen, C.Y. (2000) ‘Gorilla in the Midst’, Fortune 14 August: 257. Chilton, P. (1996) Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common European Home. Bern: Lang. Chilton, P. and Ilyin, M. (1993) ‘Metaphor in Political Discourse: The Case of the “Common European House” ’, Discourse & Society 4: 7–31. Chilton, P. and Lakoff, G. (1995) ‘Foreign Policy by Metaphor’, in C. Schäffner and A.L. Wenden (eds) Language and Peace, pp. 37–59. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Chouliaraki, L. and Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clausner, T. and Croft, W. (1997) ‘Productivity and Schematicity in Metaphors’, Cognitive Science 21: 247–82. Clifford, L. (2000) ‘Tyrannosaurus Rx’, Fortune 30 October: 84. Condor, S. and Antaki, C. (1997) ‘Social Cognition and Discourse’, in T.A. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Structure and Process. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Vol. 1, pp. 320–47. London: Sage. Croteau, D. and Hoynes, W. (2001) The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dirven, R., Frank, R. and Putz, M. (eds) (2003) Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Emanatian, M. (2000) ‘Metaphor Clustering in Discourse’, Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, 13 May, Santa Barbara, CA.


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V E RO N I K A KO L L E R ,

PhD, has been Lecturer in CDA at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University since September 2004. Her research interests are in both cognitive semantics and Critical Discourse Analysis, especially with regard to corporate and media discourse. Her current work addresses the cognitive structure of corporate identity and its multi-modal communication in discourse. A D D R E S S : Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, UK. [email: [email protected]]
