Metaphor in British Party Political Manifestos

Abstract

In this chapter I will undertake a Critical Metaphor Analysis of a corpus comprising the party political manifestos of the British Labour and Conservative parties since the end of the Second World War. I was interested in describing and explaining the metaphors used by the two major British political parties by comparing different parts of the corpus. If ideology influences metaphor use, we would expect political parties to use metaphor differently and for metaphor use to change over time according to shifts in outlooks and beliefs.