hellog〜英語史ブログ / 2021-09-02

■ #4511. 概念メタファー「政治はスポーツである」 [conceptual_metaphor][metaphor]

　英語でも日本語でもスポーツに起源をもつ表現がスポーツ以外の領域で日常的に用いられるということが多々ある (cf. 「#4480. テニス用語の語源あれこれ」 ([2021-08-02-1])) ．政治の言説においても，スポーツに由来する表現は豊富だ．
　例えば Polzenhagen and Wolf (157) からの引用となるが，2006年に George W. Bush が，中間選挙についてアメフトの表現を借りて，次のように表現したという．

And they [the Democrats] just --- as I said, they're dancing in the end zone. They just haven't scored the touchdown, Mark, you know; there's a lot of time left.

　この種の表現は日常的であり，"POLITICS IS SPORTS" という概念メタファー (conceptual_metaphor) を立てて差し支えないだろう．この概念メタファーが成立する理由として，Polzenhagen and Wolf (157--58) は次のように述べている，

   There are obvious reasons why these sports lend themselves as source domains for conceptualizing the political scene, and elections in particular: They highlight notions like competition, strategies, teamwork, and winning and losing. They are played in seasons. Furthermore, sports events are public events involving players and supporters, and they have a strong emotive component. They hence provide a rich conceptual structure that can be readily mapped onto the domain of politics, and the various mappings have been worked out in the literature referred to above. However, from a CS [= Cognitive Sociolinguistics] perspective, it is not merely the structural properties of the source domain and the enormous popularity of these sports that need to be considered in order to account for the pervasiveness of the metaphors under analysis. . . .
   . . . .
   The baseball creed hooked up with American cultural keywords . . . like the American Dream (success through perseverance), the myth of classlessness of American society (a supposedly democratizing sport that is open to anyone regardless of social standing), the belief of American exceptionalism (an allegedly genuine American sport), and others. This way, baseball was made a perfect embodiment of American freedom and the American way of life.

　引用の後半は，野球がアメリカの政治文化においてどのように位置づけられているかを評したものとして読みごたえがある．

　・ Polzenhagen, Frank and Hans-Georg Wolf, "World Englishes and Cognitive Linguistics." Chapter 8 of The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes. Ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Devyani Sharma. New York: OUP, 2017. 147--72.

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