Abstract
(How) Can the use of hyperbole in metaphorical idioms and scenarios contribute to an increase in emotionalisation of public debates? Using a research corpus of quotations from British politicians speeches and interviews and of press texts 2016-2020, this paper investigates hyperbolic formulations in Brexit-related applications of the proverb You cannot have your cake and eat it and related scenarios of national liberation, which appear to have strongly boosted emotionalised public debates. For instance, Brexit proponents reversal of the cake proverb into the assertion, We can have our cake and eat it, and their figurative interpretation of Brexit as a war of liberation (against the EU) triggered highly emotional reactions: triumphant affirmation among followers, fear and resentment among opponents. The paper argues that the combination of figurative speech (proverb, metaphor) with hyperbole heightened the emotional and polemical impact of the pro-Brexit argument. Whilst this effect may be deemed to have been rhetorically successful in the short term (e.g. in referendum and election campaigns), its long-term effect on political discourse is more ambivalent, for it leads to a polarisation and radicalisation of political discourse in Britain (as evidenced, for instance, in the massive use of hyperbole in COVID-19 debates). The study of hyperbole as a means of emotionalisation thus seems most promising as part of a discourse-historical investigation of socio-pragmatic effects of figurative (mainly, metaphorical) language use, rather than as an isolated, one-off rhetorical phenomenon.
Highlights
The concept of emotionalisation implies a heightening of emotional intensity, as defined in psychology and in an approach to linguistics that is interested in the “emotive” and “interpersonal” aspects of language (Alba-Juez & Larina 2018, Jakobson 1960, Halliday 1978, Mackenzie & Alba-Juez 2019)
Hyperbole has become the object of research in several branches of linguistics, Pragmatics including Relevance Theory (Carston & Wearing 2011, 2015, Norrick 2004), Cognitive Studies, especially regarding the interplay with metaphor and irony (Barnden 2017, 2018, 2020, Burgers, Brugman, Renardel de Lavalette & Steen 2016, Burgers, Renardel de Lavalette & Steen 2018, Colston & Keller 1998, Peña & Ruiz de Mendoza 2017) and political discourse studies (Kalkhoven & De Landtsheer 2016)
We take a corpus-based view at the relationship of hyperbole and metaphor, their combination in political discourse, both in the short term and in a medium-term discoursehistorical perspective (Reisigl & Wodak 2009)
Summary
The concept of emotionalisation implies a heightening of emotional intensity, as defined in psychology and in an approach to linguistics that is interested in the “emotive” and “interpersonal” aspects of language (Alba-Juez & Larina 2018, Jakobson 1960, Halliday 1978, Mackenzie & Alba-Juez 2019). These headlines are enigmatic: at best, readers can make out that Brexit is viewed, strangely enough, as a “cake”, that there is an ideology based on it (“cakeism”, comparable to other “isms”) and that a weird combination of “rosbif” (a supposed mock-European loan of English roast beef) with cake is associated with Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister at the time of writing and the leading pro-Brexit-campaigner from February 2016 onwards.1 If they have a good knowledge of English idioms they may recognise the allusion to the proverb, You cannot have your cake and eat it (too) in (1), but its usage in that example is problematic because it asks a seemingly senseless question: if common sense – as embodied in the proverb – states that ‘eating a cake’ and ‘having it’ (in the archaic sense of keeping it) is impossible and/ or unjustifiable, why suggest that it is worth trying?.
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