A multimodal perspective on representations of pillars in the European political discourse

This contribution offers a multimodal perspective on verbal and visual representations of pillars in the English-language political discourse on Europe. The choice of multimodal representations of pillars for this case study is twofold. First, not many conventional metaphors can be tied to an exact timeline of their creation and development, and therefore illustrate the progress of their institutionalization. Second, there is a dearth of empirical research on multimodal representations of institutionalized metaphors in European political discourse, which do not only describe a given reality but also cause social change.
The key findings are as follows: (i) Verbal and visual representations of pillars can be placed on a continuum, ranging from novel to highly conventionalized figurative expressions in contemporary public discourse. However, various degrees of their conventionality or novelty can be observed in different instances of conceptual mappings in political discourse about Europe produced within the same time span; (ii) The degree of conventionality or novelty of the expressions under study depends on the communicative purposes of different social actors as well as specific genres, which can be modified within individual situational contexts; (iii) There are noteworthy semantic differences between verbal metaphors and their nonverbal counterparts, even if the underlying conceptual patterns are similar. These findings pave the way for further theoretical and empirical research
into multimodal representations of conventional source domains relevant for and contextualized in the European political discourse.