Cognitive metaphors in political discourse in Malta and the case of EU-membership debate

The present thesis illustrates how metaphors can offer a glimpse
into people’s worldviews; they can enable insights both into
individuals’ and nation’s attitudes and beliefs. It is suggested,
however, that in order to assure a greater validity of results a
flexible methodological approach needs to be adopted, or, more
precisely, a combination of methods is almost indispensable. A
mixture of methods (corpus, sociocultural information gained from
sociological studies and questionnaire) was applied in order to
seek authentic ways of conceptualisation of the EU, but also ways
of conceptualising of prevalent source domains in the EU debate.