ABSTRACT
Although researchers have paid much attention to the JOURNEY metaphorical frame, little seems known about its role for moral political cognition. This chapter applies the moral-cognitive approach of frame analysis to corpus data from the US and UK public discourses on the Euro crisis, demonstrating that the JOURNEY metaphor can play a crucial role for political cognition, and especially for moral political judgement.
Furthermore, cross-cultural differences in temporal thinking will be revisited. This is a crucial issue in its own right as it will benefit intercultural communication and reduce misunderstandings. For example, if we assume that things on the right/left indicate some future state (evaluated either positively or negatively), then this may be wrong or oversimplistic and so lead to wrong evaluations of the communicative intent. Since this is a very common idiom, a deeper understanding of just what affects interpretation would be a valuable precondition for understanding how interpretations are formed and what potential misunderstandings there might (or might not) be. In this chapter, analysis of the JOURNEY metaphorical frame runs against what the widely accepted “journey” and “time” image schemas discussed in the literature would have us believe.
