Metonymy and the conceptualisation of nation in political discourse

Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses the role of metonymy, especiallyplace-for-people, in current constructions of national identity. The corpus consists of ten political speeches (commemoration and election speeches) from Germany, Montenegro and North Macedonia used to detect and examine different levels of variation: from text type to cross-linguistic differences in the use of metonymies. The analysis showed that the most frequent metonym in two Western Balkan countries is the country name, referring to both the speaker as representative of an institution, and population. By contrast, the country name is rarely used in German speeches due to particular communicative and cultural factors. At the pragmatic level, metonymies perform a number of functions, such as legitimization, collectivization and evaluation. Moreover, they are used also as euphemisms and argumentation topos.