Dem europäischen Körper eine europäische Seele

Körperkonzepte einer europäischen Identität

Abstract

Metaphorical fields as well as their functional dimensions are as wide-ranging in the political discourse as they are in nearly any other field. It seems that in general metaphors can realize far more than it is generally attributed to them (see Davidson 21999: 344-345, 366-369). This paper focuses on one of the metaphorical functions, namely the one of constructing identity, which is particularly important to the political discourse in Europe. On the basis of examples of body concepts of which there are countless ones to be found in the corpus, this function is discussed hereafter.