Conceptualising Foot and Mouth Disease

The Socio-Cultural Role of Metaphors, Frames and Narratives

Abstract

In this article we study the socio-cultural conceptualisation of foot and mouth disease (FMD), which raged in the United Kingdom in 2001. Farming myths and metaphors of war and disease were strong points of reference in the political and media discourse about this epidemic and they also interacted with potent visual images of death and destruction. Analysing FMD as a social and cultural phenomenon allows us to go beyond the singlesentence analysis method, which still prevails in cognitive linguistics, and focus instead on metaphors as part of stereotypical narratives and as used in the context of wider semantic and historical fields of imagery. We argue that metaphors are not only cognitive but also cultural and social phenomena. They tap into a nation’s cultural imagination, they reinforce cultural stereotypes, they naturalise social representations and they shape social policy.