Prof. Dr. Andreas Musolff – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Andreas Musolff

University of East Anglia
Intercultural Communication

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow)
September – December 2017

Website

E-Mail: A.Musolff@uea.ac.uk

Last Update: 31.08.2018

Curriculum Vitae

Andreas Musolff studied English, German and Linguistics at Düsseldorf University and SOAS and graduated with a PhD thesis on the status of Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie in the history of linguistics. Since 1990 he has worked in the UK, as lecturer and professor in German Language Studies at Aston University (Birmingham) and Durham University and, since 2010, as Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of East Anglia (Norwich). His research interests focus on Cognitive Metaphor Studies, Intercultural and Multicultural Communication, and Public Discourse Analysis. He has published especially on figurative language in the media and in the public sphere in general; his publications include the monographs Political Metaphor Analysis – Discourse and Scenarios (2016), Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust (2010), Metaphor and Political Discourse (2004), and the co-edited volumes Metaphor and Intercultural Communication (2014), Contesting Europe’s Eastern Rim: Cultural Identities in Public Discourse (2010) and Metaphor and Discourse (2009). He is currently Chairman of the Executive Board of the International Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM).

Selected Publications

2017 Metaphor, irony and sarcasm in public discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 109: 95-104.
2016 Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourses and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.
2014 (ed). Metaphor and Intercultural Communication. London: Bloomsbury.
2010 Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust. The Concept of the Body Politic. London: Routledge (Paperback: 2014).
2004 Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan (Paperback: 2015).

FRIAS Project

How are national identities and emotional attachment to them expressed across different languages and cultures?

The role of metaphors in the relationship between language and culture and their significance for the notion of linguistic relativity has become the subject of intensive debate over the past decade. This project focuses on the mappings The Nation Is A Body and The Nation Is A Person, as elicited in a questionnaire-based survey, which has been conducted over the past three years and has been answered by 900 students from 31 linguistic backgrounds in 10 countries. The results of the questionnaire survey revealed four distinct models for Body-focused readings (i.e. Nation As Geobody, As Functional Whole, As Part Of Ego’s Body and As Part Of Global Body), plus further evidence of strong variation in Person-focused readings. The two most frequent Bodyfocused interpretations, i.e. Nation As Geobodyand Nation As Functional Whole, as well as the Male v. Female Personversions are represented across all cohorts but show strongly divergent frequency and elaboration patterns for the Chinese vs. ‘Western’ (North American, Israeli and European) cohorts. The contrasts can be linked to a focus on social harmony and territorial integrity among respondents from Asian countries and a more individualist outlook by Western respondents, which develop further research hypotheses in Intercultural Communication Theory. The project period will be used to discuss the research results at FRIAS and write up per-reviewed articles and a research monograph under contract with Springer Science.