The Politics of Climate Change Metaphors in the U.S. Discourse - Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Analysis from an Ecolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

This book uses critical metaphor analysis to show from a cognitive perspective how climate change is conceptualized in the USA. The author enriches his linguistic analysis with cognitive aspects such as source-target domain mapping and metaphor opposition to explain how metaphor works in terms of framing this issue, drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis-informed framework to demonstrate how politicians represent the climate crisis in their attempts to trigger social change. Using a data set of speeches given by US-based politicians, governors and mayors speaking in the context of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, the book categorizes metaphors on different conceptions such as war, construction, unfairness, journey, and cleanliness to bridge the gap between ecolinguistics and critical metaphor analysis. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including applied linguistics, political communication, ecolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics and psychology. 


Othman Khalid Al-Shboul is Assistant Professor at Jadara University, Jordan. He holds a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Memphis, USA. He has 12 years of teaching experience at different universities in the USA, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and his work has been published in international journals.