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Second Language Learning and Teaching

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk Editor

Cultural
Conceptualizations
in Language and
Communication
Second Language Learning and Teaching

Series Editor
Mirosław Pawlak, Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts, Adam Mickiewicz
University, Kalisz, Poland
The series brings together volumes dealing with different aspects of learning and
teaching second and foreign languages. The titles included are both monographs
and edited collections focusing on a variety of topics ranging from the processes
underlying second language acquisition, through various aspects of language
learning in instructed and non-instructed settings, to different facets of the teaching
process, including syllabus choice, materials design, classroom practices and
evaluation. The publications reflect state-of-the-art developments in those areas,
they adopt a wide range of theoretical perspectives and follow diverse research
paradigms. The intended audience are all those who are interested in naturalistic
and classroom second language acquisition, including researchers, methodologists,
curriculum and materials designers, teachers and undergraduate and graduate
students undertaking empirical investigations of how second languages are learnt
and taught.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10129

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
Editor

Cultural Conceptualizations
in Language
and Communication

123
Editor
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
Faculty of Philology
State University of Applied Sciences
in Konin
Konin, Poland

ISSN 2193-7648 ISSN 2193-7656 (electronic)

Second Language Learning and Teaching
ISBN 978-3-030-42733-7 ISBN 978-3-030-42734-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42734-4
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
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Introduction

The present volume includes a survey of topics which combine the rapidly
developing field of cultural linguistics, dealing with the perception of the world by
different ethnic groups, and incorporating the main assumptions of cognitive lin-
guistics, which elaborates on major aspects of human mental activities, i.e., con-
ceptualization. Cultural conceptualizations are formed during the interaction of
members of particular cultural groups, sharing the overlapping systems of patterned
thinking, behavior, and language, including its metaphoricity and conceptual sys-
tem. Humans perceive the world, communicate, and express their thoughts in a
variety of ways, which are conditioned both by the dynamic communication sys-
tems, contexts and by particular cultural conventions, which are the topics of the
present studies.
The volume is a collection of selected studies, presented at the international
Contacts & Contrasts 2019 conference, which focused on Cultural
Conceptualizations in Language, Literature, and Translation, and was organized
on April 1–3, 2019, by the Department of Research in Language, Literature, and
Translation of the State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland. The
organizers wish to express their appreciation both to the conference participants and
to the Rector of the State University of Applied Sciences; Prof. Dr. habil. Mirosław
Pawlak, for his support and encouragement; and to the referees of the submitted
papers, Prof. Katarzyna Szmigiero of Jan Kochanowski University in Piotrków
Trybunalski and Prof. Jacek Tadeusz Waliński of the University of Łódź.
The volume comprises 18 chapters concerning the general theme of Cultural
Conceptualizations in Language and Communication. The chapters are thematically
ordered. The first part Metaphor, Iconicity, and Culture, which includes five
chapters, concerns culturally motivated metaphors and iconicity, as well as some
iconic principles between language and visual mode. The first chapter “Metaphors
for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY and/or PERSON” by Andreas
Musolff discusses the metaphorical conceptualizations of nation as body (part) or
person, in which the author categorizes the results into five coherent scenarios that
emerge from the collected data across different nations. The chapter “Why Would
We Rather Peg Out Than Simply Die?—How Do GAME Metaphors Help Us Deal

v
vi Introduction

with Death Across Languages and Cultures?” by Wojciech Wachowski and Karen
Sullivan focuses on the experience of death in figurative expressions across various,
often unrelated, languages and cultures. The metaphoric blend, as the authors
demonstrate, makes it possible for people to think and talk about the negative
human experience, dying, in terms of one of a positive experience, playing a game.
In his study “On Patterns of Conceptual Construal in Tok Pisin” Krzysztof Kosecki
discusses the patterns of conceptual construal in this creolized variety of Pidgin
English spoken in Papua New Guinea, particularly its metaphoric, metonymic,
and metaphtonymic systems. Małgorzata Wasniewska’s chapter “The Red Pill,
Unicorns and White Knights: Cultural Symbolism and Conceptual Metaphor in the
Slang of Online Incel Communities” is a study concerning the use of symbols,
conceptual metaphors, metonymies, and other cultural conceptualizations by the
members of the online incel community, an informal group of mostly male indi-
viduals identifying as “involuntarily celibate”. The author discusses the, often
controversial, language the group uses in online discussions, which is a rarely
researched topic in cultural cognitive linguistics. The last chapter in the first part
of the volume, by Kamila Zielińska-Nowak, “Iconic Nature of Board Game Rules
and Instructions”, focuses on two levels of iconicity in instructions included with
board games and takes into consideration both the graphic elements and the lan-
guage itself. The author takes a cognitive linguistic perspective of iconicity to
uncover the basic structure of the board game instruction manuals.
The second part of the volume, Cultural Models and Communication, comprises
four chapters. The first two chapters are centered around the cultural conceptual-
izations of the concept of family. The first one by Barbara Lewandowska-
Tomaszczyk and Bibigul Burkhanovna Utegaliyeva “Kazakh Cultural Models of
Family and Home in Contrast” discusses a fairly unchartered domain of Kazakh
cultural conceptualizations of family and home against the relevant cultural back-
ground. This paper presents a cluster of concepts of family and home from a
cross-linguistic perspective of Kazakh cultural conceptualizations, which are dis-
cussed with reference to British English culture. The article reviews also certain
relevant cultural dimensions distinguished by Hofstede 1980, which can be ascribed
to some of the properties that emerge from the analysis.
Agnieszka Stępkowska’s chapter “Family Networking of Bilingual Couples:
Reactions to Otherness” is a report on the experiences of bilingual couples who
construct their family networks, with a particular focus on the reactions demon-
strated by the extended families of either partner. The next two contributions in this
part introduce the question of stereotypes. Anna Bączkowska’s chapter “Framing
the Conceptualization of Obesity in Online Chinese and British Quality
Newspapers: A Corpus-Assisted Study” focuses on the conceptual framing of
obesity in two online newspapers, Chinese and British, using the corpus-assisted
discourse studies approach. The author observes that while the Chinese corpus data
indicate rather the causes of obesity, the British corpus data attend to its remedies
and treatment. The final chapter in the second part, Katarzyna Krakowian-Płoszka’s
“From the Theatre-in-the-Round to the Theatre of the Oppressed—A Process of
Forming Interaction”, is a survey of the techniques of the theatre as the techniques
Introduction vii

of communication and looks at the way interaction and expression become part
of the spectator’s experience, expanding their self-awareness.
The third part of the volume Identity and Cultural Stereotypes takes up the
notion of stereotypes introduced in the second part and extends it in terms of the
concept of identity, prejudices, and cultures both in general language and in liter-
ature. Six chapters in this part discuss identity in native and migration contexts and
consider the motifs of journey and migration, as well as social and cultural
stereotypes and prejudice in transforming contexts. Kamila Ciepiela and Anna
Ciepiela’s chapter “Changes in the Stereotype of Italians in Polish Students of
Italian Philology” discusses the dynamics of knowledge and perception of Italian
culture with Polish students of Italian, exposed to broadening experience with
Italian people and culture.
The chapter “The Trope of the Wanderer in “Post” Era German (Migration?)
Literature” by Anna Stolarczyk-Gembiak offers a review of the trope of the
“wanderer” in German literature, which seems to be especially valid in this day and
age when migration has become one of the most important issues in the European
and global social reality. Ewa Rybicka-Urbaniak’s contribution “Trans(de)
formations—Migrant Traumas in Aga Maksimowska’s Giant” continues in the
vein of migration literature by discussing the notion of migrant traumas in the novel
by Aga Maksimowska.
The next chapter in the volume is Katarzyna Wójcik’s “The Ethnos of Volhynian
Germans—From the Study of Language Islands to National Socialist Propaganda”,
The author focuses on the ethnos of the Volhynian Germans in German historical
prose from the 1920s to the 1940s. The topics of German and Austrian identity in
the Croatian town of Osijek in its present and past periods are further discussed in
the chapter “German and Austrian Identity in Modern Slavic Osijek” by Michał
Kucharski, and the final chapter in third part of the volume, “Can the Social
Ecological Model Help Overcome Prejudices?” by Michael B. Hinner, demon-
strates details of a social ecological model originally proposed by Urie
Bronfenbrenner as an overall framework to analyze complex social issues and help
overcome prejudices.
Three chapters in the final, fourth part of the volume, Linguistic Concepts,
Meanings, and Interaction, focus on the semantic interpretation of the changes and
differences which occur in their intra- and inter-linguistic contexts. The first two
chapters focus on the questions of grammar and modality. The first chapter “The
Verb Wollen “To Want”—Its Formal Development and Grammaticalization
Processes”, by Marta Woźnicka, discusses the processes of development and
grammaticalization of the German verb wollen “to want” on the basis of corpora
of the Old, Middle, and Early New High German. The chapter by Agnieszka Kaleta
“Conceptualizing Modality: A Case Study of Polish Modal Verbs” offers a new
interpretation of selected modal Polish verbs with Leonard Talmy’s theory of force
dynamics.
The volume is concluded with a chapter by Jakub Krzosek “Semantic
Compositionality of Compounds in the Cognitive and Construction Grammar
Frameworks: A Comparative Study of Korean and Polish Compounds”. The study
viii Introduction

is primarily devoted to major factors of meaning distribution within compositional

compounds by comparing the compounds of Polish and Korean equivalents of
“bread”, which provides an adequate point of references to identify significant
contrasts between these two languages and cultures.
The topics discussed in the studies presented in the volume concern a plethora of
cultural models and conceptualizations in terms of various culturally salient con-
cepts and contexts, in a number of, frequently unrelated, languages such as English
and its varieties, German, Polish, Italian, and Croatian on the one hand, as well as
Korean, Kazakh, Japanese, and Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) on the other.
The volume as a whole may help to portray diverse models and systems of cultural
conceptualizations of objects, relations, and events, essential for human life and
existence.

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Metaphor, Iconicity, and Culture

Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY
and/or PERSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Andreas Musolff
Why Would We Rather Peg Out Than Simply Die?—How Do GAME
Metaphors Help Us Deal with Death Across Languages
and Cultures? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Wojciech Wachowski and Karen Sullivan
On Patterns of Conceptual Construal in Tok Pisin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Krzysztof Kosecki
The Red Pill, Unicorns and White Knights: Cultural Symbolism
and Conceptual Metaphor in the Slang of Online Incel
Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Małgorzata Waśniewska
Iconic Nature of Board Game Rules and Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Kamila Zielińska-Nowak

Cultural Models and Communication

Kazakh Cultural Models of Family and Home in Contrast . . . . . . . . . . 97
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
and Bibigul Burkhanovna Utegaliyeva
Family Networking of Bilingual Couples: Reactions to Otherness . . . . . 115
Agnieszka Stępkowska

ix
x Contents

Framing the Conceptualization of Obesity in Online Chinese

and British Quality Newspapers: A Corpus-Assisted Study . . . . . . . . . . 129
Anna Bączkowska
From the Theatre-in-the-Round to the Theatre of the Oppressed—A
Process of Forming Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Katarzyna Krakowian-Płoszka

Identity and Cultural Stereotypes

Changes in the Stereotype of Italians in Polish Students
of Italian Philology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Kamila Ciepiela and Anna Ciepiela
The Trope of the Wanderer in “Post” Era German (Migration?)
Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Anna Stolarczyk-Gembiak
Trans(de)formations—Migrant Traumas in Aga
Maksimowska’s Giant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka
The Ethnos of Volhynian Germans—From the Study of Language
Islands to National Socialist Propaganda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Katarzyna Wójcik
German and Austrian Identity in Modern Slavic Osijek . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Michal Kucharski
Can the Social Ecological Model Help Overcome Prejudices? . . . . . . . . 239
Michael B. Hinner

Linguistic Concepts, Meanings, and Interaction

The Verb wollen ‘to want’—Its Formal Development
and Grammaticalization Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Marta Woźnicka
Conceptualizing Modality: A Case Study of Polish Modal Verbs . . . . . . 275
Agnieszka Kaleta
Semantic Compositionality of Compounds in the Cognitive
and Construction Grammar Frameworks: A Comparative Study
of Korean and Polish Compounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Jakub Krzosek
Metaphor, Iconicity, and Culture
Metaphors for the Nation:
Conceptualization of Its BODY
and/or PERSON

Andreas Musolff

Abstract One of the key-complexes for conceptualizing national identity is that of

the metaphor of the nation as a body or a person. Such nation-embodiment and -
personalization have a long conceptual history in English-speaking cultures and still
figure in present-day political discourse. However, do metaphor users from differ-
ent cultures understand such metaphors in the same way as English-L1-speakers?
Empirical evidence from an intercultural metaphor interpretation survey conducted in
English-as-lingua franca provides evidence of variation in Nation-embodiment and-
personalization on the reception-side. Five scenarios of interpretive conceptualization
can be identified, which are variably distributed across different national/linguistic
cohorts: nation as body, as geobody, as part of a larger body, as part
of ego’s body and as a person. This chapter focuses on comparing such sce-
narios across the English-L1 and Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)-L1 cohorts.
The results show differences in scenario distribution, as well as in the use of irony
and humor and of topical references to socio-economic and political developments
or national stereotypes. In conclusion, we discuss how these differences are related
to culture-specific discourse traditions.

Keywords Embodiment · English-L1 · English as lingua franca · Metaphor ·

National identity · Scenario · Survey

1 Introduction

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the metaphors nation-as-body and

nation-as-person are grounded in the immediate body-experience (Gibbs, 2005;
Johnson, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Ziemke et al., 2007)—after all, what
could be more familiar to us than our own bodies and personalities? However, the
familiarity of the body as a source domain is not necessarily a sufficient reason to

A. Musolff (B)
School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies,
University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, NR4 7TJ Norwich, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.), Cultural Conceptualizations in Language and
Communication, Second Language Learning and Teaching,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42734-4_1
4 A. Musolff

assume an experiential universality of these metaphors beyond a very general level.

After all, body and person concepts are themselves cultural concepts (Maalej &
Yu, 2011; Sharifian et al., 2008; Yu, 2003, 2008). Hence, different cultural traditions
may still vary substantially in highlighting specific body and personality aspects
as sources for nation conceptualizations. The present chapter aims to find out if
empirical evidence can be found for such variation and what it means for the concept
of “culture” in cognitive metaphor theory.

2 Cultural Influences on Metaphor Interpretation

Traditionally, arguments about cultural specificity of conceptual metaphors concern

their production-side (Kövecses, 1995, 2005, 2017; Musolff et al., 2014; Yu, 2003,
2008), but more recently their learning by English as L2-speakers and their reception
by hearers or readers has also become the focus of research (Littlemore & Low,
2006; Littlemore et al., 2011; MacArthur & Littlemore, 2011; Nacey 2013; Philip,
2010; Piquer-Piriz, 2010; Wang & Dowker, 2010). Metaphors of public discourse,
however, may conceivably be understood uniformly across various languages and
cultures, due to their high conventionality. The lexicalized English metaphors body
politic, head of state, head of government, for instance, are nowadays learnt as part
of English political vocabulary and, if unclear or not known, can easily be looked
up in a dictionary (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1999, p. 149; Deignan,
1995, p. 2; Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2002, p. 258). Nevertheless, there
is still the possibility that learners of English or other recipients with a different L1
than English may all identify these metaphors correctly but work out meanings that
they think are the correct ones but which are different from those intended by the
speakers.
This assumption is not as far-fetched as it may sound. When teaching on a course
for international MA students with good English L2 competence at the University
of East Anglia in 2011, I ran a class test to make sure that the recently mentioned
term body politic had been correctly understood by the students. 50% of them were
Chinese; the rest was made up of British, US-American, European, Kurdish and
Arab students. All of them were asked to explain the meaning of body politic with
reference to their own nations. Here follow eight exemplary responses from the class
exercise:
(1) Student A: “The head of the body represents the Queen of England, as she is in charge
of the whole country and she is royalty. The features of the head (eyes, nose, mouth and
ears) represent the different official people, such as politicians, the Prime Minister, the
Government”.

(2) Student B: “If one organ or part of the national body suffers, the whole body would
suffer from fever. In other words, having a healthy body requires healthy parts. As a nation,
a problem in one area of a country should attract the attention of the whole people in that
country”.
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 5

(3) Student C: “2 Heads: Head of state is the king?—Not sure anymore! Head of government
are [Prime Minister] Rajoy and the big banks’ presidents”.

(4) Student D: “The face: president and government; the brain: oligarchs, members of par-
liament (make all decisions in essence); the hands: official and unofficial local authorities
(including mafia groups); the mouth: the media—controlled by the oligarchs/MPs (dictate
political ideology)”.

(5) Student E: “Beijing: Heart and Brain, Shanghai: Face (economic center); Hong Kong
and Taiwan: Feet; Tianjin: Hands (=army close to Beijing); Shenzhen: Eyes (=the first place
open to the world)”.

(6) Student F: “Beijing is the heart of China. […] The railway is the throat of China. Shanghai
is the economic backbone of China. Tsingtao is the skeleton of Shandong province. Shenzhen
is the liver of China; Tiananmen is the eye of Beijing. Nanjing is the face of Jiangsu; Szechuan
is the hair of China; Xiangyang is the heel of China”.

(7) Student G: “Beijing: brain (government); Shanghai: hug/arm (welcome to foreign

people); Guangzhou: feet (keep China going); Hong Kong: face (familiar to everyone,
representative); Taiwan: hair (we can live without hair but it is necessary for beauty)”.

(8) Student H: “[…] Taiwan: potential disease (maybe one time we have to fight against it and
occupy it); Tibet: stomach (sometimes you feel uncomfortable); The head of the government:
hair (if one goes down, always some other one will grow up)”.

Example (1) was produced by a British student, examples (2)–(4) by a Saudi

Arabian, a Spanish and a Ukrainian student, respectively, and students E, F, G, and H
were Chinese. Whilst all answers are correct in the sense that they fulfilled the task,
the responses fall into two distinct groups. The first four responses describe a nation’s
political system in terms of a body’s anatomy, physiology and health. Responses (5)–
(8), on the other hand, identify geographical places in China, including the politically
separate state of Taiwan, and link them to parts of the human anatomy on the basis
of functional correspondences between them and political institutions or activities in
the respective cities/provinces and give further descriptive or evaluative explanations.
These explanations often also serve to personalize the characterizations in the sense
that they present the Chinese nation as presenting a face to the outside world, hugging
those who are friendly towards it, or actively fighting diseases.
The first four responses differ in the national target referents but share the con-
ceptualization of the nation state and its institutions through functionally motivated
analogies to the human body. The analogies are not particularly precise but they
are sufficient to indicate two main organizing principles, i.e., that of a hierarchical
ordering (head/brain = superior to rest of body) and that of the interdependence of
all parts of the body. These two notions can be related to the body politic metaphor
tradition in European/Western culture. The view of monarchs or other state leaders
as heads of nations, of institutions as organs, and of the whole state as suffering
if one part suffers illness or injury, which these answers articulate, is compatible
with formulations of the nation-as-body concept by Western thinkers and poets
since the Middle Ages, which have been reconstructed as a continuous tradition by
historians of ideas (Charbonnel, 2010; Harvey, 2007; Kantorowicz, 1997; Musolff,
2010). This tradition need not be consciously known by present-day users but its
6 A. Musolff

sedimented terminological traces, such as head of state, head of government, long

arm (of the law), organ (of a party), heart (of the nation), and prominent uses by
present-day politicians and media provide evidence for its continuity to this day. It
thus seems not unreasonable to conclude that the British student’s answers as well as
the Arab, Spanish, and Ukrainian students’ responses (all of whom had majored in
English language and literature in their first degrees) stand in a loose but still tangible
connection to that tradition.
In the Chinese students’ responses, by contrast, a basic metonymy place-for-
political institution/function (e.g., Beijing—seat of government, Shanghai,
Shenzen, Hong Kong –economic centers, Taiwan—politically separate island state,
Tibet—province with outlawed independence movement) is used to motivate the
metaphor geographical shape of a nation as anatomy of a human
body, which in turn leads to analogical sub-mappings, e.g., brain or heart as con-
trolling the rest of the body; face, eyes, arms as oriented to the outside world; hair as
a variable physical property. These second-order analogies are loaded with specific
evaluative interpretations, e.g., in the depictions of Taiwan as one of China’s feet (i.e.,
as an essential part of the nation’s body), or as hair (beautiful but not necessary for
survival), or as disease (to be combated) in examples (5), (7), and (8), respectively.
The Chinese students’ interpretations cannot be linked to the Western conceptual
tradition in the same way as the non-Chinese responses but of course that does not
mean that they are without history. One possible link to historical traditions and col-
lective experience may be the role of China’s publicly imagined “geobody” as part
of its national identity. The political scientist W. A. Callahan contends that visual-
izations of China’s borders in maps are characteristic of a “Cartography of National
Humiliation” (Callahan, 2009). Based on the historical experience of having been a
victim of colonialist attacks by foreign powers up until the mid-twentieth century,
Chinese cartography has served to articulate fears of future territorial “dismember-
ment”, e.g., in a map from 1999 that purports to show an “international conspiracy to
divide up the PRC [People’s Republic of China] into a clutch of independent states”
(Callahan, 2009, p. 143). More recently, however, the goal of geopolitical maps in
China is “no longer primarily to recover lost territory” but to achieve “symbolic
recognition, acceptance and respect” (2009, p. 171). If geographical contours and
locations are of such prominence in the public sphere of China, the grounding of
conceptualizations of its state organs and body parts in geo-political metonymies,
which we observed in the Chinese students’ answers, makes good sense.

3 Scenarios of Metaphor Interpretation

The two metaphor versions—nation as (anatomical/organic) body and

nation as geobody—are based on the same source domain but are conceptu-
ally different and include more than just propositional content—their conceptual
material is selected so as to form specific argumentative and narrative wholes, i.e.,
they suggest certain evaluative conclusions, e.g., that in a healthy body all organs
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 7

must ‘work together’ or that an ‘illness’ needs to be ‘treated’ and eradicated. Such
a selection of source-domain elements is what has been referred to as a “scenario”
(Deignan, 2010, pp. 360–362; Musolff, 2006, 2016b; Sinding, 2015). The narrative
and argumentative perspectives of scenarios make them highly attractive for drawing
strong pragmatic, evaluative inferences and thus, for use in political discourse.
When used metaphorically, scenarios suggest an evaluative perspective on the
target topic by suggesting inferences about it and hiding others. Their ‘dramatic’
story lines and default outcomes, as well as ethical evaluations are connected to social
attitudes and emotional stances prevalent in the respective discourse communities.
Hence, preference for one scenario over another in a discourse community may be
indicative of attitudinal and ideological tendencies.
However, it clearly needs a larger database than eight answers in a class test to
gauge culturally ‘characteristic’ scenario preferences in interpretive conceptualiza-
tions of one’s nation. To widen the empirical evidence, the students and I devised a
questionnaire-based survey that asked informants to describe their “home nation in
terms of a human body” and in addition elicited information on first language, nation-
ality, age and gender (Musolff, 2016a). With the generous help of colleagues and
students in language/linguistics departments this survey was administered in other
UEA seminars and in further Higher Education institutions in 23 different countries
and yielded more than 1200 returned questionnaires, which are still being analyzed
(Musolff, 2016a, 2016b, 2020 forthcoming). The survey was not set up as a statisti-
cally valid psycholinguistic experiment; instead, it aimed at a qualitative pilot-study
of conceptual variation in metaphor interpretation.
In addition to the above-mentioned two scenarios of nation as body and
nation as geobody, which appeared in the first cohort’s responses, the survey
revealed three further scenarios. The first two of these are still body-focused. One
of them viewed the nation as part/organ of a larger body:
(9) England is like an appendix, not very significant anymore but can still cause trouble and
make you realise its [sic] there if it wants to.

An alternative ‘nation-as-part-of X’ scenario is that of the nation as part of

one’s own (=ego’s) body, which is often sourced from the notions of heart and
blood as the center/medium of the speaker’s identity:
(10) Motherland likes [sic, probably intended: ‘is like’] my blood. Blood is a part of my body
so that I can’t live without blood, and I also can’t live if I lost my motherland. What’s more,
motherland likes my blood [sic], because I feel its warmth and at the same time it provides
me the ‘oxygen’ and ‘nutrition’.

Other examples of this type conceptualize the nation as the speaker’s own feet/legs
(for “standing up and going forward in the world”), hands (for “creating the people”)
or eyes (for “noticing the democracy and equality enjoyed by general citizens as well
as the corruptions and irresponsibility of some government parasites”).
Whilst this last group of interpretations use body aspects to give an ego char-
acterization of the nation, about a fifth of all responses use the person concept as
the source (in response to a task that only asked for “body”-conceptualization!). The
8 A. Musolff

Chinese data include not only lexical references to the home nation as “motherland”
(example 10) but also detailed depictions of “motherly” character/behavior (exam-
ple 11), and we also found male-gendered examples, e.g., in the English-L1 cohorts
(example 12):
(11) Our nation is like a mother, who covers her children under her protection.

(12) Britain is an easily likeable friend, […] [He] is ancient but is experiencing revitalization
[…].

Together, these five scenarios (nation as body, geobody, part of larger

body, part of ego, person) account for all responses; sometimes one response
only includes one scenario, sometimes two or three; in rare cases four or even all five.
In the following sections, we will provide an overview over the corpus data for the
English and Chinese L1-cohorts, as part of an analysis-in-progress. (From here on,
the examples include also information about nationality, age, gender, in abbreviated
form.)

4 The English-L1 Cohort

The sample of responses from informants with English as First Language was col-
lected at nine universities across Britain, USA and New Zealand and various Euro-
pean universities; it amounts to 120 scripts (49 British, 26 US, 42 New Zealand, 2
Australian and 1 Canadian). It would of course have been desirable to have more
balanced national sub-samples but this has so far not been possible due to practical
problems in the diverse national environments. Hence, the English-L1 responses are
treated here as one unitary sample, except for a few outstanding cases that seem to
be indicative of specific national tendencies in conceptualizing one’s own nation as
a body.
The social make-up of this sample is characterized by a preponderance of 18–
25 year old female informants (Table 1).
According to the scenario categorization outlined above, the sample generated
143 scenario instantiations, which show the following distribution (Table 2).

Table 1 Social Indicators:

Gender Female 69 58%
English-L1
Male 51 42%
Age group 18–25 103 86%
26–30 6 5%
31–40 5 4%
41+ 6 5%
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 9

Table 2 Scenario distribution: English-L1

Scenarios Body Geobody Body part Part of ego Person
Scenario tokens (total: 143) 68 29 14 2 32
Percentages (%) 48 20 9 1 22

4.1 The Nation as Whole BODY

The BODY-based scenario type clearly dominates the English L1 sample, with 43 dis-
tinct body and a further 9 health/illness-related sub-concepts underlying the 251
instances of relevant lexical items. They include the body-whole as well as separate
limbs and organs, taboo body areas (anus, armpit, hard to see places) and medical
conditions and their treatment. The most frequent lexical fields are (in descend-
ing order) body-organism, brain-head, heart, blood-veins-arteries, limbs-
organs, hands and feet. The most prominent usage pattern, which is also evident
in examples (1) and (2) above, is the ‘classic’ hierarchical top-down model of polit-
ical anatomy that bears a striking resemblance to famous formulations in the history
of English-language literature and philosophy:
(13) England is an organism. Its head is the Queen, its torso and limbs are the state and
government. Its heart is culture and history, its brain is parliament. Its feet is [sic] the
economy. (UK, 25, M)
(14) If New Zealand was a body, the Prime Minister would be the head in control and at
the top. The Queen would be the hair, technically higher, but with no real power. The feet
would be our farms, covered in mud but helps us [sic] trudge along, the main source of our
momentum. The hands would be our vineyards, full of fruit ripe for the picking, useful and
helpful. (NZ, 19, F)
(15) The United States of America is like a human body. In fact, we often refer to it as the
body politic. The government of the U.S. is the head, or the brain. It is (supposed to be) in
control of the country’s functions. The states are the various parts of the body, functioning
independently, but under the control of the ‘brain’. (US, 48, F)

Whilst the target referents at the ‘top’ of the state/body hierarchy change for the
simple reason that there are different government structures in the respective polities,
the function of the head/brain source is always the same, i.e., that of control of the
rest of the body. However, this control-function may be put in question, as indicated
in the “(supposed to be)” hedge in example (15). More explicit criticism can be found
in the US sample:
(16) It’s [sic] brain is bipolar and completely disjointed in the middle (US, 25, M)
(17) […] like Frankenstein [sic; correctly: Frankenstein’s monster], we have an abnor-
mal brain commanding the body, which is causing our country to act and react with more
negativity and distastefulness (US, 48, F)

In the British and New Zealand samples, such criticism of the brain is rare but in
some cases the metaphorical dichotomy heart versus brain (reason versus emotion)
is employed to signal a split personality:
10 A. Musolff

(18) The brain and heart don’t always agree with one another, and this conflict is normal
(UK, 22, F)
(19) New Zealand listens to its heart more than its brain. (NZ, 19, M)

It would be wrong, however, to conclude from the latter examples that the heart
concept is always or predominantly used in the conventionally metaphorical ‘seat
of emotions’ meaning. The majority of target concepts of heart in our corpus are
either central political institutions (monarchy, parliament) or the people.
An alternative source for the ‘people’ concept is blood, due to its ubiquity and
continuous movement indicating liveliness/vitality. Other target concepts for blood
are the economy, public finances, business and public transport (often likened to the
veins and arteries). The concepts of arms, hands, legs, feet as well as eyes
are associated with various ‘executive’ parts and functions of state and society (mil-
itary, police, secret service, middle class, economy, workers). One British informant
mentioned that “the long arms are the reach of the empire” (UK, 21, M) but did
not specify whether this was meant as a topical or historical description. Often, the
extremities are summarized as limbs that are complementary to the central control
part (head-brain/heart), without further specification.
The collective category organs fulfils much the same function in our texts:
(20) New Zealand works as a collective body in that there are a number of different sectors
of society that work like the different organs of a body in order to function as a whole. (NZ,
20, F)
(21) […] a person can only survive if their heart/lungs/brain organs are functioning, […] A
nation—like Britain—can only function well if all its parts, the government, the monarchy,
and its inhabitants—work together. (UK, 21, F)

illness/disease and medical treatment concepts are rare in this sample,

amounting as they do to altogether just 6%. Both the summary references (sick,
ailment, scars, pain) and specific notions such as cancer, infection and trans-
plant are only represented in single figures. They are used to express criticism of
parts of the respective nation state. Another vehicle for criticism is that of taboo or
ugly body parts, which also straddles various scenarios. In the organological and
physiological hierarchy there are a few instances:
(22) The queen sits at the face of the nation, with the flabby, saggy Tory government, as the
aged, wrinkled décolletage. (UK, 19, F)
(23) […] the anus would be the actual workers. While the brain thinks it controls the anus,
the most it can do is ask or demand things to be done (NZ, M, 18)
(24) The head is the white guys in charge. They also double as the asshole. (NZ, 18, F)

Such drastic and offensive examples are few in number but they show the potential
of body part conceptualization to support strongly evaluative arguments and even
insults. Whilst the target referents are more or less arbitrarily chosen, the sources
appear to be derived from a ‘stock’ of low-prestige body concepts that are entrenched
in the everyday discourse, idioms and taboo subjects of the respective discourse
community.
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 11

4.2 The Nation as a BODY PART

To view one’s own nation as a body part, e.g., a limb or an organ is a perspective
taken in 10% of scenarios in the English L1-sample. It is conceptually close to the
previous scenario but differs from it insofar as its referent is either seen as part of a
larger body (e.g., continent or world), or as a body part that is typical for a particular
socio-political function or status of the nation in question. Its applications are less
schematic or descriptive than those that view the nation as a whole body and they
almost always carry an explicit or an implicit (ironical) evaluation. The positive
evaluations highlight useful limbs/organs, such as eyes, hands, and heart (the
latter with its ‘seat of emotions/passions’ symbolism):
(25) At the heart of the modern world, GB represents the eyes of development […]. (UK,
21, F)

(26) America is like the hands of a human body; they are used for work, get dirty often, and
when backed in a corner, are used to fight. (US, 20, M)

(27) Our nation is like a beating heart, where pride and passion flow as blood (NZ, 20, M)

In more critical responses, the body part chosen to represent the nation is
typically low in the body hierarchy in terms of (lack of) importance for survival, e.g.,
appendix (see example 9 above), belly button and toe:
(28) Britain to me is the belly button. A part of previous high value involved in changing the
lives of many. Now an aesthetic part with a lesser importance than the rest of the body (UK,
22, M)

(29) New Zealand can be seen as the Middle toe of the world, while one may not acknowledge
or care for it when removed the balance of the body will simply be off (NZ, 19, M)

One US student highlighted his nation’s double-sided role in the world by

describing it as the lower back, which he judged from his own body experience
indispensable although it could be painful:
(30) Lower back. You really need it and it is a very key part. It also gives a lot of people
pain. Some people feel different ways about it. You really can’t ignore it and most things are
connected to it (like your legs to the belly) (US, 20, M)

This group of critical body part-applications also contains one of the rare cases
where the depiction of one’s own nation in body terms is followed by a matching’
characterization of another country, with an ironical slant:
(31) The first thing that came to mind for the United States was the head. The US is the sole
remaining superpower state (although its influence is declining) making it arguably the most
important nation to the rest of the world. […] back home we call Canada “America’s hat”,
where does a hat go but on the head? (US, 20, M)

Such a linkage between a body part conceptualization and a dress item is unique
in the corpus and is most probably a spur-of-the-moment invention by the writer. It
underlines the high potential for body part concepts to be exploited for humorous
and/or judgmental purposes.
12 A. Musolff

4.3 The National Territory as a GEOBODY

When the nation is viewed as a territorial or geographical body whole, the body
part concept lends itself to being applied to particular places. In the English L1-
sample, this is not the dominant scenario but still accounts for 20% of all scenario
uses. Its referents are to some extent predictable: the capital is seen as head, brain,
or heart due to its status as the seat of government/power and its concomitant con-
trol function for the rest of the national body. Hence, London, Washington, DC, or
Wellington are placed in these ‘top’ locations, often with another city (e.g., Birm-
ingham, New York, Auckland) as the complementary central organ; i.e., brain and
heart. Rural regions (e.g., Yorkshire in the UK, the Midwest in the US) are associ-
ated with hands and feet on account of agricultural activity. Some respondents also
feel encouraged to declare their allegiance to—or aversion against—specific places
and regions:
(32) I was born and bred in the north-east of England, so that’s where I picture as the heart
of my home nation. Of course, the head of state is situated in the south east of England, so
that it seems the heart is above the head—geographically speaking. (UK, 27, F)

(33) […] perhaps London is the brain as it seems to be where people go to work after study.
The real brain is Cambridge, the best university the country has to offer. Don’t talk about
Oxford, that is the fungal nail infection, which we haven’t got round to treating yet (UK, 24,
M)

(34) Washington DC is the brain/head/mouth. The legs are the producing states (It keeps the
economy going/moving). Nebraska is the heart. LA is the cancer killing the nation/body.
Florida is the wrinkles and parting lines. New York is the adrenaline. (US, 42, M)

(35) The brain is Auckland. The heart is Wellington. The liver is Dunedin. NZ needs a liver
transplant (NZ, 20, M)

In many cases, the multiple organ-assignations to national places show that no

‘exact’ anatomical analogy is attempted. But in the case of the liver conceptual-
ization of Dunedin, NZ, in example (35) a specific explanation has been proposed
by Professor Takashi Shogimen (personal communication): “Dunedin used to be a
major economic center in the 19th century […] from the early 20th century Dunedin
witnessed economic decline and transformed itself as a campus city. The city of
Dunedin is currently planning to reinvent itself over the next 10–20 years […] the
last two lines [may be] motivated by the historical understanding of Dunedin’s place
and function in NZ and also the knowledge of its possible renewal in the years to
come”.
As with the body part symbolism of the whole nation (see previous section),
body part conceptualizations of places or regions can imply notions of a hierarchy
among the body parts or organs, as well as of their respective state of health and
aesthetic value, which are exploited for humorous or polemical effects. This leads to
characterizations of regions as illnesses (cancer, nail infection as in examples
33, 34) or as ‘lower’/taboo body parts: appendix, guts, armpit, and toe.
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 13

4.4 The Nation as a PERSON

The one scenario that invites the most strongly evaluative metaphorical conceptual-
izations of the nation as a (human) body is, unsurprisingly, the personification of
the nation. In spite of the fact that the questionnaire task did not explicitly mention or
ask for this variant, slightly more than one fifth of scenarios in the English L1-sample
consisted of conceptualizations of the nation as a person, sometimes as the only
characterization, i.e., without any further body/body part-related explanations.
Across the national subgroups of the English-L1 sample, there seem to be no
discernible trends or highly emotionally charged conceptualizations. age and gen-
der indications are generally rare: altogether they amount to 3 old (=all for UK),
2 young (=US, NZ) characterizations, as well as 3 male and 5 female characteri-
zations (one mention of mother status in the NZ sample). Depictions of character
traits are judgmental but not drastic: headstrong, mouthy, messy, easy going, friendly
measly, pessimistic. One New Zealand respondent (19, F) alleged, “The North hates
the south” but conceded that “Both [are] working for & against each other”; so, the
‘hatred’ cannot be that strong, one would assume. ‘National character’ stereotypes
are exploited mainly for the UK, i.e., as a person obsessed with tea-drinking,
football and queuing. In a few cases, the characterization is extended into a mini-
narrative that ‘explains’ the origins of the person-quality in question, e.g., ageing
(36), obesity (37), wishing to impress others (38), combined with an ironical
criticism.
(36) England is an ageing person, one that has been going for a long time. A small frame
with big potential. England used to have many other clothes (colonies) to dress itself in.
However, it has since given away all of it’s [sic] clothes. (UK, 18, F)

(37) My nation is fat. Lying supine, its head is in the center, as well as its feat [sic]. Its limbs
branch like a star. Its fat is a combination of future pregnancy, a bloaded [sic] past and an
uncontrollable metabolism. (US, 25, M)

(38) New Zealand is like a little brother chasing after the nations of the world and clamouring
for attention. (NZ, 18, F)

Overall, the nation conceptualizations produced by English-L1 informants show

that the body scenario is the dominant one. Its hierarchical presuppositions
(top-down orientation, functional hierarchy of life-essential versus non-essential
organs/limbs) show a high degree of congruity with classical Western ‘Nation-
as-Body’ conceptualizations (e.g., head-to-toe hierarchy, ‘fable of the belly’). The
body-part scenario also fits this overall pattern but includes extra taboo organ con-
cepts that have little to do with classical literary or philosophical models and instead
allow the authors to comment on aspects of the body politic they want to ridicule.
This judgmental stance is also characteristic for the territorial geobody-scenario, in
which the respective capitals are assigned top status (head, brain or heart) whilst
specific places or regions are relegated to the lower regions, and the person scenario,
which is characterized by ironical references of national stereotypes.
14 A. Musolff

5 The Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) Cohort

The Chinese sample, which has more than twice the amount of scripts (N = 306)
than those from English-L1 informants, was collected from nine Higher Education
institutions: four universities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which make
up the bulk of the sample (N = 248), one university in Hong Kong (N = 24), plus
three smaller samples from British Universities (Aston, Birmingham, UEA) and a
German university, i.e., Heidelberg. There were no informants from Taiwan but the
politically independent island still features in the responses, as we have already seen
in examples (5), (7) and (8).
In the Social Indicator questions, the entries for both the “L1” and the “nationality”
questions were mostly (91%) “Chinese” in the PRC and Hong Kong samples; only
a few informants specified “Mandarin” or “Cantonese”. As the systemic differences
between Mandarin and Cantonese were not a parameter of our investigation, this
aspect was largely disregarded and all L1-entries counted as “Chinese”. Nevertheless,
we must take into account that nearly 10% of the Chinese responses were produced
by students in or from Hong Kong, where most respondents’ L1 is Cantonese and
where the political culture is different from that of the People’s Republic. This aspect
will be highlighted in the discussion of the geobody and person scenarios, which
are most often used for comments on the relationship between the PRC and Hong
Kong (In these cases, nationality indications for the authors of specific examples
from the Chinese cohort (“C”) will be amended to “C [HK]” in order to identify the
Hong Kong sub-group. All other “C” indications refer to the PRC).
The age distribution was concentrated almost exclusively in the 18–25 age bracket,
and the preponderance of female informants was even more pronounced than in the
English L1-sample (see Table 3 above).
In terms of scenario categorization, the Chinese sample has 341 scenario instanti-
ations, which include 601 tokens of physical body/health concepts and 289 tokens
of person concepts, totaling 890 tokens altogether.
The scenario distribution contrasts strongly with the English-L1 sample: the two
most frequent scenario variants here are person and geobody, with body only in
third place. Conceptualizations of the Nation as body part of a larger whole or as
part of the writer’s own body (part of ego) each make up about 10% of the total
(Table 4).

Table 3 Social indicators:

Gender Female 192 62%
Chinese sample
Male 115 38%
Age group 18–25 302 98%
26–30 1 0.5%
31–40 3 1%
41+ 1 0.5%
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 15

Table 4 Scenario distribution: Chinese sample

Scenarios Body Geobody Body part Part of ego Person
Scenario tokens (total: 341) 65 91 33 34 118
Percentages (%) 19 27 9 10 35

In order to facilitate the comparison with the English L1 sample, we will discuss
the scenarios in the same order (body, body part, part of ego, geobody,
person). This ordering has the advantage of ending on the most frequent scenario,
person, which allows us to highlight the main characteristics of the Chinese data as
well as Hong Kong-specific findings.

5.1 The Nation as a (Whole) BODY

Except for the very first cohort of respondents who did the exercise in 2011 and
answered exclusively by way of the geobody scenario (see above), the body sce-
nario was employed by Chinese informants across all sub-cohorts in almost one fifth
of all scenario instantiations. Its most frequent sub-concepts were heart (12%),
brain (10%), blood (6%), and hand(s) (6%). Some uses of the body scenario
come close to the ones we encountered in the English L1-corpus:
(39) As for my home nation China, I think the central government is like the brain of a
body, which can use the energy to make some important decisions. And the working class,
including the business and factories [sic] are like the muscles which can provide the energy
for the moving of the whole body. Besides, the transportation system is like the blood vascular
system. (C, 19, M)

(40) Our country is like a whole human body. Many ingredients make up of it [sic]. The
government is the head and brain with all sorts of sectors just like the five sense organs on it.
The people from all trades and professions make up the hands and feet that make the country
working. Also the citizens are like the blood which all [sic] cover the body. The environment
is like the skin, we live in it, meanwhile, it protects us. With all of these can the country
(body) be complete. (C, 19, F)

Most uses of the body scenario, however, are unspecific about individual organs
and their functions. Unlike in the English L1-sample, such general conceptualiza-
tions do not highlight the inter-dependency of the whole body and all of its parts or
organs very often—the respective percentages are marginal: 3% for body-whole
and 2% for parts/organs in the Chinese sample vis-à-vis 16% (body) and 6%
(parts/organs) in the English L1-sample. Instead, the most recurrent scenario
theme is the “control” that the brain (as referring to the Chinese government, the
ruling Party or the “People’s Congress”) has over the rest of the body. brain is
used much more often than head (10%:3%), which again differs from the English
L1-sample where they show roughly equal and higher percentages (21%:20%).
16 A. Musolff

The heart concept is employed mostly refer to the people, its culture and long his-
tory; in the latter cases, the body scenario often combines with the person scenario
(examples 41–43):
(41) The people, as a whole, is like the heart. (C, 19, M)

(42) Culture is the heart of a nation. Well goes an old saying: “If you want to kill a country,
you should kill his [sic] culture at first”. (C, 18, M)

(43) And history can serve as heart, because it forms the whole country’s behavioural concept,
or spirit. (C, 19, M)

In addition to the heart, the following source concepts target the people as a
whole in the body scenario: whole body (“China is like a whole human body of a
normal person”). blood (“the citizens are like the blood which all cover the body”),
hands and feet (“people from all trades and professions make up the hands and
feet that make the country working”), cells (“our ordinary people are cells”). A
distinct sub-theme, is the role of police and army as the nation’s immune system
(less frequent variants: arms, hands, fists, bones):
(44) The police officers are our immune system. (C, 18, M)

(45) Army is the skin and immune system, keep the body in fit. (C, 19, M)

(46) Our army is like immune system that keep [sic] us away from incursion. (C, 19, M)

illness-disease and medical treatment sub-themes of the body-scenario

amount to just 5% of sub-concepts. Half of these are vague references to bad
state of health, illness, or patient-status; specific concepts (cancer, obe-
sity, weakness, blindness, deafness) all remain in single figures. One example,
however, stands out on account of its apparently radical stance against “parasites”:
(47) Our body is a fat, powerful man with a lot of minor illnesses. He can be rude and
self-conceit [sic] sometimes, but he is a kind person in most cases. Now he is taking pills to
wipe out the parasites in his body. I believe one day he will get recovered and be strong and
healthy again. (C, 19, M)

This example is unique in several ways: it combines body and person scenarios
in an individualizing way (‘occasionally rude but essentially kind, beset by illnesses,
against which he takes pills’) and focuses on the nation-person’s need to take
medication against parasites. The target-referent of this parasite-concept is not
specified but the alleged necessity to wipe out the agents of illness fits in with the
more ‘radical’, biologized version of the body v. parasite scenario that has been
used historically to justify persecution of so-called ‘enemies from within’ (Musolff,
2010). Such a use of the parasite concept is not repeated across the Chinese sample;
it may be informed by a narrative from another source.
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 17

5.2 The Nation as a BODY PART

The Chinese conceptualizations of the nation as a body part, limb or organ differ
markedly from those in the English-L1 cohort in that most of them express a strongly
positive, proud assessment of one’s own national importance rather than being used
for belittlement or criticism. They do not feature ‘superfluous’, unimportant or taboo
organs (e.g., appendix, anus, armpit) but instead highlight the indispensability of
the nation for the survival of the world, seen as the respective larger body-whole:
(48) China resembles the feet of human body. It stands erect at the east of world just like the
feet on the ground. (C, 22, F)

(49) China is like vein [sic] because it connects with many countries. (C, 21, M)

(50) China is the heart of the body made up by all countries. […] Just like the heart, China
delivers blood to the body of world. (C, 18, M)

(51) Nation is like hair. It is soft and beautiful. (C, 19, F)

These conceptualizations articulate positive assessments of China’s pre-eminent

political (feet standing erect), and economic role (vein connecting countries, delivers
blood) and appearance (beautiful hair). They can, however, also be employed to
revisit the national defense theme:
(52) I’d like to think my home nation [sic] as the hands. From a long history, Chinese people
are never lack [sic] of creation and production. And as for the international affairs, China
has the power to act as a counterweight to some so-called superpower. It is just like a hand
to both assault and defend. (C, 19, M)

Overall, the main evaluative function of body part conceptualizations in the

sample is to praise the Chinese nation as a powerful, important and necessary body
part of the world.

5.3 The Nation as Part of EGO

A similarly appreciative evaluation is derived from conceptualizations that depict

the nation as part of the writer’s own body/person. Here, the positive evaluation is, if
anything, even stronger, because the writer identifies with it directly and personally,
thus intensifying the alleged praiseworthiness. Typical examples of part of ego
conceptualizations are:
(53) My nation China is like my heart. It supports me to live and study. Without it, I will be
homeless and lose my passion for life. I love my nation and cherish it. I look it [sic] as my
heart which makes me alive. (C, 18, F)

(54) I’d like to compare my nation as [sic] my hands. It gives me chances to do something I
like. (C, 19, M)
18 A. Musolff

(55) From my perspective, our motherland is just like the blood of our body. As blood is the
red liquid, I think motherland is also red, which represents the energy and passion of our
nation. (C, 21, F)

(56) China is so important to all the Chinese as eyes are important to human’s body. People
will not die if they lose their eye. But they see clearly who they are once they possess the
eyes. (C, 21, F)

heart, blood, eyes and hands are the most frequently used body part con-
cepts for the nation that are ‘incorporated’ by Chinese informants into their own phys-
iology and anatomy. As examples (53)–(56) show, the body part conceptualization
can be attributed to the speaker as an individual or as a member of the nation-body.
In the latter case, the scenario part of ego could be seen as overlapping with that of
the nation as a body/body part or as a person. The difference lies in the focus on
the nation as part of the writer’s identity, in contradistinction to its perception as the
‘other’. This scenario’s significant presence (10%) in the Chinese corpus contrasts
with its minimal occurrence in the English-L1 corpus. It may be linked to culture-
specific attitudinal preferences that have been highlighted, for instance, in research
on Anglo-based “individualism” vis-à-vis Chinese “collectivism” (Hofstede, 2001):
the latter preference evidently favors ego-nation identification.

5.4 The Nation as a GEOBODY

The geobody scenario stood out as the main (and seemingly exclusive) scenario for
the Nation-as-body metaphor complex used by Chinese students in the first class exer-
cise but it turns out to account for ‘only’ 27% in the wider Chinese-L1 sample, which
makes it the second most-frequent scenario behind person. Still, it is more frequent
than in the English-L1 cohort (20%). More significantly, it has a wider conceptual
range. Besides the two most frequent source concepts, brain and heart, which
are applied in the great majority (but not exclusively) to Beijing and Shanghai (see
examples 5-8 above), the body-source concepts applied to geographical places, i.e.,
cities, provinces, landscapes, rivers and landmarks include: artery, back, back-
bone, bone, blood, chest, face, eyes, foot/feet, ear(s), hair, hands, kidney,
leg(s), lung(s), mouth, stomach, shoulder, skin, throat, and womb. The
most recurrent of these are face and eyes, hands and arms, mouth and throat,
which are applied to border or harbor cities and provinces, such as Shanghai, Hong
Kong, Macao, Wenzhou, Guangdong and Guangzhou; these are accompanied by
explanatory motivation notes such as looking outward, embracing and connecting
with and receiving or providing nutrition from/to the outside world.
Overall, the vast majority of instantiations are of neutral or positive polarity.
Even contested or ‘exceptional’ regions such as Taiwan, Tibet or Hong Kong are
emphatically asserted to be essential, valuable and well-functioning body-parts of
the nation:
(57) Tibet is just like the eye of China. Because it is the highest place in China. (C, 19, F)
Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY … 19

(58) Taiwan and Hong Kong just like two foot of our China. As we all know, Taiwan and
Hong Kong are inalienable parts of our China. […] As economically developed regions,
both of them can drive the economic development of mainland China. In that way, China
can keep striding ahead to the world. (C, 20, F)

Explicit references highlighting a contested status of a region/place in the geo-

body scenario are limited to Taiwan and Hong Kong. When authored by mainland
Chinese (PRC) informants, they are used to emphasize those places’ indispensability
for China’s integrity (examples 59 and 60 below) or their exposed position and vul-
nerability (61). Some Hong Kong informants, however, highlight their city’s relative
independence (62):
(59) Taiwan is China’s hair which can be long or short but still is part of body. (C, 19, F)

(60) China, a cripple at present staggers to the future for the lack of Taiwan. China waits for
Taiwan to come back. (C, 21, F)

(61) Tai Wan [sic] is the elbow, it can hit others and get harm [sic] easily. (C, 21, M)

(62) Nation to me seems more of a dislocated limb (Hong Kong) and the body (the rest
of China), […] Hong Kong plays the first role in stepping/reaching out to the western
civilization—pretty similar to how one walks out of a door and/or stretches arm out in
search of new things [C[HK], 20, M]

The last example is the only one in addition to those from the first cohort that
hints at a special political status of a specific region in China by way of the geobody
scenario; the majority of critical and/or ironical conceptualizations are part of the
person scenario (see below). These findings fit in with the hypotheses formulated
above, i.e., that the geobody-scenario may be evidence of a heightened concern
among Chinese informants for their nation’s geo-political integrity, but they should
not be over-generalized, as geobody only forms the second-largest scenario for the
Chinese cohort in terms of the overall scenario distribution.

5.5 The Nation as a PERSON

The most frequently invoked scenario in the Chinese sample is that of the nation-
as-person, with just over one third (35%, i.e., 289 tokens) of all conceptualizations.
Its most salient aspect are explicit gender assignations, with male ones accounting
for 10%, female ones for 21%. Among the latter, mother assignations alone account
for 11% of the total (This count only includes attributive and predicative uses of the
term mother, i.e., not routine references to motherland). Typical examples are:
(63) China provides her people lands, food and protection, just like a selfless mother. (C, 19,
F)

(64) China is like a mother, always kind to others, turning fierce when its children are bullyed
[sic]. (C, 19, F)
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
the Corn Laws;[495] but the bounty was kept up in name to the end of
the century. In 1795 and 1796 the price of wheat rose to 80s. a
quarter, in 1797 and 1798 it sank to 54s.; but, at the end of harvest,
1799, it rose to 92s., in 1800 to 128s., and before the harvest of 1801
to 177s. The quartern loaf (under 6d. in 1885) was once within ½d.
of 2s.! Then came a cycle of comparative plenty. Wheat between 1802
and 1807 was at 75s. on an average, and a new Corn Law in 1804
prohibited importation till the home price should rise to 63s.
Between 1808 and 1813 it was 108s. on an average; and it was as high
as 140s. 9d. in the severe winter (1812–13) of Napoleon’s retreat
from Moscow. But in the spring of 1815 wheat was at 60s. If it should
rise to 63s. the ports would be opened, and there was not even the
Protection of war. The farmers and landowners were terror-stricken,
the political economists divided, and the bill for raising the
importation price to 80s. was hurried through the House. The
bounty, relaxed in 1773, had been finally repealed, in 1814.[496] As the
sliding scale of duties was not introduced till 1827, we are to regard
Malthus and Ricardo as writing on rent (in 1815 and 1820) under the
severe Corn Law of 1815, as well as when the wisdom of passing that
measure was still under debate. All their discussions on rent bear
consciously or unconsciously upon the Corn Laws of their own time.
Malthus is rightly considered the first clear expounder in England
of the economical doctrine of rent. Dr. James Anderson, a
contemporary of Adam Smith, was no doubt before his age in his
view of the subject;[497] but, perhaps because he was better known as
an agriculturist than as an economist, he does not seem to have
made converts. The “simultaneous rediscovery” of the true doctrine
by West and Malthus in 1815 may be compared with the
simultaneous discovery of the Darwinian theory by Wallace and
Darwin in 1859. The times were ripe for it. Malthus gives no certain
sound on the subject in the early editions of the Essay on
Population. In the second he even says that “one of the principal
ingredients in the price of British corn is the high rent of land” (p.
460; cf. p. 444). However, needing to lecture on Rent to his pupils at
Haileybury in 1805, he saw the unsoundness of this position, and in
1806, in the third edition of the essay, the passage is dropped, and
we are told, “universally it is price that determines rent, not rent that
determines price” (vol. ii. p. 266). The passage is repeated in the
fourth edition (1807).[498] But when the time came for a fifth edition,
in 1817, the whole of the chapters on Corn Laws and bounties, which
are the only chapters of the essay that deal much with rent, were
recast, to express the clearer views which the author had already
expounded elsewhere. In the spring of 1814, in the excitement of
debates on the abolition of the bounty and on new laws to keep out
foreign grain, Malthus was led for the fourth or fifth time in his life to
take the field as a pamphleteer.[499] This time, however, he came
forward, he said, not to take a side but to act as arbitrator. His
“Observations on the effects of the Corn Laws, and of a rise or fall in
the price of corn on the agriculture and general wealth of the
country” (1814),[500] professed to balance the arguments for and
against the Corn Laws, and did it, he said, so judiciously, that his
own friends were in doubt to which opinion he leaned.[501] To later
readers the bias is not doubtful. It appears even in such a passage as
the following, which, incidentally, shows us his view of rent, nearly
matured:—“It is a great mistake to suppose that the effects of a fall in
the price of corn on cultivation may be fully compensated by a
diminution of rents. Rich land, which yields a large nett rent, may be
kept up in its actual state, notwithstanding a fall in the price of its
produce, as a diminution of rent may be made entirely to
compensate this fall, and all the additional expenses that belong to a
rich and highly-taxed country. But in poor land the fund of rent will
often be found quite insufficient for this purpose. There is a good
deal of land in this country of such a quality, that the expenses of its
cultivation, together with the outgoings of poor’s rates, tithes, and
taxes, will not allow the farmer to pay more than a fifth or sixth of
the value of the whole produce in the shape of rent. If we were to
suppose the prices of grain to fall from 75s. to 50s. the quarter, the
whole of such a rent would be absorbed, even if the price of the whole
produce of the farm did not fall in proportion to the price of grain,
and making some allowance for a fall in the price of labour. The
regular cultivation of such land for grain would of course be given
up, and any sort of pasture, however scanty, would be more
beneficial both to the landlord and farmer.”[502] The drift of the
pamphlet may be shortly stated. The writer refused to go with Adam
Smith in identifying corn with food, and attributing to it in that
capacity an unchangeable value, which made any rise of price futile
for the encouragement of tillage. He thought that it was perfectly
possible to encourage tillage by Corn Laws; but was it good policy?
Before he could answer this question, he felt bound to consider
several others.[503] Under free trade would Great Britain grow her
own corn?—if not, ought Government to interfere to secure this?—if
so, would laws to hinder importation be the best kind of
interference? The answer to the first is, that other countries have
soils more fertile than Britain; Poland can ship corn at Dantzig for
England at 32s. a quarter;[504] and, if there were free trade over
Europe, the rich lands which are not English would send their plenty
to relieve the wants of their neighbours. If Corn Laws have not made
us grow our own corn, free trade would not. In answer to the second
question, no doubt it is sound economy to buy in the cheapest
market and sell in the dearest; and, if we had regard to nothing but
the greatest “wealth, population, and power,” the rule would be
invariable; foreign imports of food are in every case a good thing for
the country, and, if there is evil in the matter, it is not in them but in
the bad season which makes them necessary; moreover, a free trade
in corn secures a steadier as well as cheaper supply of grain.[505] But,
on the other hand, dependence on other nations for the first
necessary of life is a source of political insecurity to the nation so
depending; and, though the dependence is mutual, identity of
commercial interests seldom prevents nations from going to war
with each other; “we have latterly seen the most striking instances, in
all quarters, of Governments acting from passion rather than
interest.”[506] And it might be argued that, if we give up agriculture
for manufacture, we change the character of our people;
manufacturing industry conduces to mental activity, to an expansion
of comforts, to the growth of the middle classes, and to the growth
with them of political moderation; but it is more subject than
agriculture to the fluctuations of fashion, which lead to chronic
destitution and discontent, and the conditions of artizan life are
“even in their best state unfavourable to health and virtue.”[507]
Virtue and happiness after all are the end; wealth, population, and
power are but the means. Malthus himself believes in something like
a golden mean, a balance of the two industries, which legislation
might possibly preserve.[508] There is another and less plausible
argument on the same side. Assuming that wages vary with the price
of corn, high money wages, and therefore high prices of corn, are an
advantage to working men, who would have more money to buy the
goods of the foreign countries where prices of corn were low and
goods were cheap. This argument, though our author is inclined to
yield to it, is inconsistent with his own views of wages and the facts
he cites in support of them.[509] More cogent is the plea that it would
be unfair suddenly to withdraw a long-established protection, though
(it might be replied) we are no more bound to be gradual in
abolishing protection than in concluding peace during war. But the
real question is, whether once protected is to mean always protected,
and protected in an always increasing degree, for it was this
increased protection that was proposed in 1814 and 1815. It may be
true that if we protect manufacture we ought to protect agriculture;
but, instead of protecting both, why not set both free? Statesmen had
no courage, however, to be free-traders, in days when the separate
articles protected were as many as the millions in the National Debt,
and each article represented a vested interest. Malthus does not
seem to expect Parliament to give free trade a moment’s
consideration. But the friends of the new Corn Laws, besides using
the commonplaces of protectionism, argued from the change in the
value of the English currency. When paper were paper prices,[510] the
importation price of the law of 1804 could be soon reached, and
foreign corn came in much faster than the real or the bullion prices
of it would have allowed. There was also the long array of standing
arguments for Corn Laws that lay stress on the heavy taxation of the
country, and are meant to show that the agricultural classes bear
most of it, and are thus handicapped against the foreigner. From
Malthus himself the old leaven of protectionism was never wholly
purged away. Like Pitt, though in a less degree, he suffered his
politics to corrupt his political economy, and drag him back from the
“simple system of natural liberty” into “the mazes of the old
system.”[511] English people since the Repeal of the Corn Laws will
hardly care to thrash the old straw out again. Perronet Thompson’s
Catechism of the Corn Laws is the best storehouse of the old
arguments and their refutations, set forth with a liveliness to which
no other English economical writing has the slightest claim.[512]
The real opinion of Malthus came out in the second Corn Law
pamphlet on the Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting
the Importation of Foreign Corn (1815). Between the two came the
tract on Rent, which is rather an economical book than a political
pamphlet, and will be noticed immediately. He now declares himself
in favour of a temporary duty on imported corn to countervail the
artificially low value of the currency,—“to get rid of that part of our
prices which belongs to great wealth, combined with a system of
restrictions.”[513]
He warns the Government that they should not take such a step to
benefit a particular trade, but only to benefit the public. The motives
are those constantly professed by defenders of the Navigation Act—
not private interests but public policy. Since he wrote his
Observations circumstances had changed. The sudden peace had
brought the then unprecedented combination of a bad harvest and
low prices; the value of the currency had fallen fast; and last, and not
least, France, the best corn country in Europe, had begun to prohibit
the exportation of grain[514] in dear years. We must therefore, he says,
keep up the high farming which the war taught us, by keeping up the
high prices of the war. Eighty shillings might not be too high a price,
for the limit of prohibited importation.
It seems extraordinary that, after so clearly recognizing that
“wealth does not consist in the dearness or cheapness of the usual
measures of value, but in the quantity of produce,” and that exports
are not so good a criterion of wealth as the “quantity of produce
consumed at home,”[515] Malthus should recommend the increase of
abundance by means of artificial dearness. It is a poor consolation to
us that he was no worse than Brougham, who voted for the Corn Law
in 1815, and for the support of the Navigation Act in 1849,—and little
worse than Ricardo, who would allow a temporary restriction for the
sake of leaseholders.[516] A better is that he was advocating a policy
that was against his private interests as a holder of a fixed salary and
owner of three per cents.[517] But at the best the atmosphere of these
two tracts is a little depressing.
The tract on Rent is more bracing. It was the first-fruits of the
larger work on Political Economy (1820); and its substance had been
delivered in the professor’s lectures at Haileybury. It expounds the
Nature and Progress of Rent with clearness and intelligibility, if
without the liveliness of 1798. Malthus gives us to understand that,
to explain this or any other economical notion, we must keep as
closely as possible to the usage of ordinary language, the language of
clear-thinking ordinary men.[518]
To them, rent does not mean, as by derivation, simply produce or
profit; nor, as to a Frenchman now and to Bailie Nicol Jarvie in his
days, interest on a debt. It means a certain price paid to a landlord
for the use of his land. But such a definition is too wide. It might
include the proceeds of a monopoly, or an interest on capital, or a
Government tax, or a legal rate, or a toll, or a payment for service
rendered. We must define the term a little more clearly.
There is a certain portion of a landlord’s income and of a peasant
proprietor’s earnings that has an origin and character distinct from
the rest, and demands the economist’s separate attention, whether it
alone receives the name of rent or not;—this is, the excess of the
produce of land beyond the cost of production and the current rate of
profits. Represent these in money; and suppose the current profit
five per cent. Suppose that a tenant lays out £500 on his farm, and
gets by the harvest and farm produce not only £500 plus £25, but
£600; the additional £75, which would if retained by him be over or
extra profits as compared with the rate usual among farmers and
men of like business, is the value of his rent; and the landlord can
take that from him without impoverishing him. Rent is that portion
of the produce which remains, after all the outlay of the cultivator
has been repaid him together with the current profits. From
accidental or temporary causes the money rents of land may be more
or less than this; but this is the point to which actual rents will
gravitate.[519]
So far as this account goes, it might seem that Malthus’ description
is too general; it would include the extra profits, for example, of any
monopoly or a royalty for the use of a patent; and Ricardo’s
definition, “the price paid for the indestructible powers of the soil,”
might seem more definite. But Malthus is rather too specific than too
general. He is thinking of agricultural land only, and that mainly as
producing food for man. If his description of the Nature of rent adds
little to that of Adam Smith,[520] his account of its Causes, which he
himself was the first to grasp, is characteristic and peculiar.
First, he says, fertile[521] soils yield a produce that more than feeds
the producer. This may be put more generally than Malthus has put
it. If rent is to be paid, there must be wherewithal to pay it; and there
cannot be so if production does no more than repay cost. There may,
however, be a production beyond mere repayment of cost, not only in
farming but in all trades. The very principle of the division of labour
and the separation of trades implies that devotion to one occupation
makes men so dexterous in production that, besides providing for
themselves, they have an overplus wherewith to supply their other
wants and the wants of others.[522] This overplus, where the facilities
for trading were specially good, might be so much above the overplus
of an ordinary profit that the granter of the facilities, who is usually
the ground landlord, might get the lion’s share of it, and still leave
the user of the facilities as thriving as his neighbours. On the other
hand, if no such overplus can be earned, no such rent can be paid.
Rent, in short, when it is paid by men of business, either in town or
in country, means over-profits, and ground-rents mean advantage of
situation.
The second cause of rent, according to Malthus, who is
considering, be it remembered, the cause of the Progress of rents as
well as of their actual volume at any given time,[523] is the peculiarity
belonging to agricultural land, that the demand increases with the
supply; in other cases the demand is external to the supply, but in
this case[524] the supply creates its demand. Where there is food there
will be mouths. In the supply of food no over-production is possible.
[525]

It is here that the Essay on Rent is connected with the Essay on

Population. By the law of population the tendency is that where food
enough for six is being produced by two, the other four will soon
make their appearance; and so, thinks Malthus, the farmer makes his
customers by simply making his wares. Something like this, we
might add, would happen in a completely developed co-operative
society, where the makers would sell to each other and buy from each
other. It is even true, in a sense, of all manufacturers as things now
are, in proportion as their articles come near to being necessaries;—if
they supply that without which people cannot live, they go far to
bring people into being. Malthus, however, regarded it as much more
true of agricultural production than of any other. He regarded food
as the chief necessary, and thought with Adam Smith, that “when
food is provided it is comparatively easy to find the necessary
clothing and lodging.”[526] Against this we need only remember, how
the Essay on Population showed that it was only in the lower stages
of existence that increase of mere food involved increase of
population; and so the tendency of the supply to create its own
demand was, on the author’s own showing, nothing more than a
tendency.[527] His economical reasoning was swayed a little by his
circumstances. The insularity of English life in his days prevented
him from conceiving how a nation could safely derive half its food
from abroad; what Adam Smith had thought too good to be likely,[528]
he thought too dangerous to be desirable. Good or bad, it is our
position now, and the result is, first, that the supply of food does not,
in the same degree or way, produce its own demand as formerly, and,
second, that our other productions are, even more truly than the
agricultural, the supply that creates its own demand, for they give the
power of buying the food that feeds new demanders. The production
carried on, on the surface of the land, has come in this way to be a
more potent cause of the Progress of rents than production from the
soil itself. With this restatement the second of Malthus’ causes of
rent becomes perhaps a little more intelligible.
His third cause is that good land is scarce. Lands differ in fertility,
and there is not, as in a new country, enough of the most fertile to
supply all our wants. When the produce of the inferior begins to be
absolutely necessary, the inferior will be cultivated at a price enough
to repay cost and give ordinary profits to the farmer. But what is
simply enough to do that for him will do much more than that for all
the holders of superior lands, and all that is much more can be taken
by a landlord as rent without placing the tenant at any disadvantage
as compared with his neighbours. As soon as this happens in a
country, the extra profits, which are called by economists rent, will
appear in it; and the growth of population, by leading to an increased
demand for food and to an increased price of it, will cause the
cultivation of inferior lands, or else a more expensive cultivation of
the old ones; and again, since the necessary new supplies cannot be
permanently kept up without one or other of these two resources, the
price, and with it the rent, will, in the absence of inventions, remain
permanently higher. In other words, this third cause is the “law of
diminishing returns.”
It is this law of diminishing returns which bulks most largely in the
tract of Sir Edward West, written in the same year as that of Malthus.
West’s theory of rent is simply, “that in the progress of the
improvement of cultivation the raising of rude produce becomes
progressively more expensive, or in other words, the ratio of the net
produce of land to the gross produce is continually diminishing.”[529]
He sees how near Adam Smith came to it when he said, that in the
progress of cultivation the total amount of rent increased, but the
proportion of it to the produce diminished, so that from being e. g.
half the produce it became one-third.[530] He sees, as even in 1798
Malthus had seen,[531] that but for this law population might increase
indefinitely on a few fertile lands instead of spreading over the globe
(West, p. 13), whereas because of this law inventions in agriculture
are not able to remove “the necessity of having recourse to inferior
land, and of bestowing capital with diminished advantage on land
already in tillage” (p. 50). He pushes the principle so far as to say
broadly that whatever increases agricultural production increases
cost, while whatever increases manufacturing production diminishes
cost (p. 48), inferring that the former must tend abroad and the
latter at home to prevent the displacement of English agriculture by
foreign competition. As he had little or no influence on Malthus, his
tract need not be noticed in detail; it is enough to say that, while
West is superior in style and arrangement, Malthus is the more
comprehensive. West is clearer and simpler because he includes less.
Looking at the three causes together, we see that the first and last
relate to the statics, and the second to the dynamics of the subject.
We need to remember that Malthus is having regard in the first
instance not to the value but to the quantity of the produce. Now,
apart from questions of value, it is possible there might be, in a
country, land yielding to the sower more than he sowed; but it might
be an ordinary excess, secured by all producers in that country, for
the land might be all equally fertile, and production from land might
be the most fertile of industries. In that case, even if the land was a
State monopoly and the producer’s gains could be taken from him by
a tax, there would be nothing corresponding to rent, in the received
sense. But, as soon as there were differences in the fertility, and
therefore differences in the quantity produced at the same cost, the
farmer who had the difference on his side could be said to have a
rent. It is this surplus, conjoined with the institution of private
property, that, according to Malthus, makes leisure and mental
progress, and even great material prosperity, possible.[532] The rent is
properly the extra profits, and not the equivalent paid over for them
to a landlord; rent can easily exist without a landlord. “It may be laid
down, therefore, as an incontrovertible truth, that, as a nation
reaches any considerable degree of wealth, and any considerable
fulness of population, which of course cannot take place without a
great fall both in the profits of stock and the wages of labour, the
separation of rents, as a kind of fixture upon lands of a certain
quality, is a law as invariable as the action of the principle of gravity.
And that rents are neither a mere nominal value, nor a value
unnecessarily and injuriously transferred from one set of people to
another, but a most real and essential part of the whole value of the
national property, and placed by the laws of nature where they are,
on the land, by whomsoever possessed, whether the landlord, the
crown, or the actual cultivator.”[533]
It is the second cause that brings the first and third into operation
in such a way as to produce the rents that we actually know in an old
country. The fertility which secures a produce beyond cost makes
extra profits possible; the growing population, which gives the
produce a value, makes them actual; and the gradations in fertility,
whereby a uniform increase in the value of produce creates far from
uniform extra profits to different cultivators, give the extra profits
the peculiar graduated character, which is characteristic of rent in
the economical sense of the word.
Malthus believed himself to have included, in this theory of rent,
what truth there was in the view of the French economists and of
Adam Smith, when they spoke of rent as due to the qualities of the
soil and not to an ordinary monopoly. His contemporaries admitted
him to have been the first clear expounder of the subject. But his
most eminent brother economist found general agreement quite
consistent with emphatic divergence in details,[534] not wonderful in a
writer who regarded every economical question as a particular case
of the problem of value rather than of wealth.
Ricardo admits that his own theory of rent is simply a farther
development of the Malthusian. In an essay on The Influence of a
low price of Corn on the Profits of Stock, showing the inexpediency
of Restrictions on Importation (1815),[535] published in answer to the
two tracts of Malthus above mentioned, he makes this quite clear,
and, unlike his disciples, is warm in praise of his rival’s powers as an
economist.[536] He agrees with the definition (of the Tract on Rent)
that rent is “that portion of the value of the whole produce which
remains to the owner after all the outgoings belonging to its
cultivation have been paid,” including an ordinary rate of profits for
the employed.[537]
But, whereas Malthus regards rent as increased by whatever
lessens the outgoings in any shape or form, Ricardo considers that
can happen in one way only, namely, by the increased cost of raising
the last part of the necessary supplies. Arithmetically it was clear
that, if you had four items making up the total expense of cultivation,
whatever reduced any one of the items pro tanto reduced the total.
[538]
Accordingly, Malthus said that rent could be increased by such
an accumulation of capital as will lower the profits of stock,—such an
increase of population as will lower the wages of labour,—such
agricultural improvements or such increase of the cultivator’s
exertions as will diminish the number of labourers needed,—or such
an increase in the prices of produce from increased demand as will
increase the difference between the expense of production and the
price of produce.[539] Ricardo, on the other hand, says that profits can
never be reduced by mere accumulation of capital or competition of
capitals, but only by the progressively less fruitful character of the
investments to be found for capital as accumulation goes on. As long
as there is fertile land to be had, yielding a rich return to capital, no
one will accept a poor return. “If in the progress of countries in
wealth and population new portions of fertile land can be added to
such countries with every increase of capital, profits would never fall
nor rents rise.”[540] In things as they are, capital soon accumulates
beyond the rich investments and has to take the poorer. Sooner or
later, even in a new colony, a point is reached where fertile land will
not supply food enough for the growing population except at an
increased cost.[541] Now, if the supply is absolutely required, the most
costly portion of it, whether it be got by an extension of cultivation to
poorer lands, or by a more thorough cultivation of the richer, will
determine the price of all the rest, for there cannot be two prices in
the same market; and the profits of the producer of it will determine
the profits of all his fellow-cultivators, for there cannot be two rates
of profit in the same business. Furthermore, the agricultural profits
will determine the rate in other businesses, for in a full-formed
society the rate in the others must bear a fixed relation to the rate in
this business, so that the one cannot materially vary without the
other.[542] Therefore the greater cost of the last portion of the
necessary supply of food will lower profits generally, will thereby
increase the range of extra profits from the richer soils, and will
thereby raise rents.
The difference between the two men is, that what Malthus makes
only one cause, Ricardo makes the only one, the increased cost of
cultivation.[543] Ricardo and his friends have certainly put cause for
effect.[544] It is of course in the first instance the high prices that lead
to the costly cultivation, and not vice versâ, for without the high
prices the produce of the costly cultivation would not be profitable.
Malthus was asked by the Committee on Emigration: “Among
other effects of resorting to a soil inferior to any now in cultivation,
which is involved in the proposition of cultivating waste lands, would
not one be to raise the rents of all the landlords throughout Great
Britain and Ireland?”—He answered: “I think not. The cultivating of
poor lands is not the cause of the rise of rents; the rise of the price of
produce compared with the costs of production, which is the cause of
the rise of rents, takes place first, and then such rise induces the
cultivation of the poorer land. That is the doctrine I originally stated,
and I believe it to be true; it was altered by others afterwards.”[545]
On the other hand, what makes the high prices permanent instead
of temporary, is the fact that the cultivation essential to the
completeness of the supply cannot be other than costly.[546] It is,
therefore, not wrong to consider costly cultivation as one cause of the
permanence of high prices, and therewith of high rents. But Ricardo
goes further, and counts it the only cause.
Through the whole progress of society, he says, profits are
regulated by the difficulty or facility of procuring food; and, “if the
smallness of profits do not check accumulation, there are hardly any
limits to the rise of rent and the fall of profit.” Nothing can increase
the general rate of profit but the cheapening of food;[547] as by
improvements in agriculture, which, by securing the same
production with less labour, for the time increase the profits and
lower the rents.[548] The landlord’s interest is therefore at all times
opposed to that of every other class in the community,[549] for it
means dear food, low profits, and high rents. Still, high rents are not
the cause either of the dear food or the low profits, but are, equally
with them, the effect of a common cause, more costly cultivation. The
effect of a costly cultivation on wages might seem vi terminorum to
be a raising of them, for wages depend on the proportion of the
supply of labourers to capital’s demand[550] for them, and by
assumption there was a greater demand. But since the cause of the
rise of price was in the first instance an increase of population, it
follows that the increased cost of raising the most costly supplies of
corn will be incurred not by higher payment of old labourers, but by
employment of new. Wages again will buy less corn, for corn has
risen. “While the price of corn rises ten per cent., wages will always
rise less than ten per cent., but rent will always rise more; the
condition of the labourer will generally decline, and that of the
landlord will always be improved.”[551] In his statement of the
doctrine of wages, Ricardo is perhaps more careful in 1815 than he is
in 1817, saying that, “as experience demonstrates that capital and
population alternately take the lead, and wages in consequence are
liberal or scanty, nothing can be positively laid down respecting
profits as far as wages are concerned.”[552] But even in 1817 his
exposition is hardly more rigid than that of Malthus himself. So far is
he from recognizing an iron law driving wages down to “the natural
price” or bare necessaries, that he thinks the market rate may be
constantly above the natural for an indefinite period, and he regards
the natural itself as expansive. The whole chapter on wages[553] shows
a just understanding of the Essay on Population. Nevertheless, if
Ricardo in one sense made too much of the principle of population in
relation to Rent, in another sense he made too little of it. He does not
see that in a progressive country it counteracts the tendency of
improvements in agriculture to cheapen produce, and thereby reduce
rents;[554] agricultural rents have risen since 1846 largely because of
high farming. He does not grant that high or low wages can affect
rent, because he regards them as purely relative to profits, and
making with profits a total amount, of which only the proportions
vary; but it is difficult to believe that the rise in agricultural wages
since 1873 or so can have failed to play a part in keeping down
farmers’ rents since that date. As, however, our view of the power or
powerlessness of lowered profits or lowered wages to increase rent
will be found to depend on our view of the causes of value, and as the
difference of the two economists on the relation of wages to profits
might have the appearance of a technical subtlety, these two items of
the total may be passed by for the present.
In regard to agricultural improvements the issue seemed plainer,
and the evidence seemed all for Ricardo and against Malthus. In a
country depending chiefly on itself for grain, a general adoption of
improvements would seem to make supplies cheaper because less
costly, and therefore to lower rents because forcing farmers to lower
prices. Even Mr. Mill did not break away from Ricardianism at this
point,[555] though he speaks less unreservedly than Ricardo upon it.
Malthus, on the other hand, who regards rent as depending largely
on the ability of the agricultural supply to create its own demands,
regards rent, accordingly, as at all times keeping pace with the
increase of grain caused by improvements, unless the improvements
outrun population. What cheapness does in other cases is to make an
article accessible to a circle of buyers previously excluded from it.
Every one is a buyer of agricultural produce and no one is excluded;
but the temporary cheapness of grain creates new buyers by making
marriage accessible to a wider circle.
The progress of rents in fact results from the conflict of two
economical tendencies—the tendency of economical expedients to
lower prices, and the tendency of an increasing population to raise
them. If Malthus’ ripest view of population be true, then a
cheapening of food among a civilized people by no means leads to a
corresponding increase of their numbers, and therefore the course of
improvement would tend so far towards a diminution of price, and
therewith of rent. If rents depended on the price of corn alone,
economical expedients (including not only the direct aids to tillage,
mechanical and chemical inventions directly applied to it, but the
indirect aids, free trade, railways, and steamers) must certainly have
lowered rents in the last hundred years. But the reverse is true,[556]
chiefly because the produce of a farm is ceasing to mean wheat, and
coming more and more to mean cattle and dairy produce, which have
not fallen but risen in price in one hundred years, while corn has
actually fallen. This variety of productions has proved financially an
equivalent to what Malthus (seventy years ago) considered the main
cause of greater extra profits to the farmer and greater money rents
to the landlord——the increased fertility of the soil in the matter of
grain, and an increased price keeping pace with it.
The commercial policy of England has become what Malthus
describes in the latter part of the Essay on Population as a
combination of the agricultural and the commercial systems. His
views on this subject became modified as he grew older. In the
second edition he says:[557] “Two nations might increase exactly with
the same rapidity in the exchangeable value of the annual produce of
their land and labour; yet ... in that which had applied itself chiefly to
agriculture, the poor would live in greater plenty, and population
would rapidly increase; in that which had applied itself chiefly to
commerce, the poor would be comparatively but little benefited, and
consequently population would either be stationary or increase very
slowly.” “In the history of the world the nations whose wealth has
been derived principally from manufactures and commerce have
been perfectly ephemeral beings compared with those the basis of
whose wealth has been agriculture. It is in the nature of things that a
state which subsists upon a revenue furnished by other countries
must be infinitely more exposed to all the accidents of time and
chance than one which produces its own.”[558] It is not, he thinks,
because of her trade, but because of her agriculture that England is
so rich in resources; it is not without danger that our commercial
policy has diverted capital from agriculture into manufacture and
commerce. About the middle of the eighteenth century we were
strictly an agricultural nation, and we were safe, for in a country
whose commerce and manufacture increase from and with the
improvement in agriculture there is no discoverable germ of decay.
But all is changed now; and there is reason to fear that our prosperity
is temporary, and we have only risen by the depression of other
nations.[559] When the nations that now supply us with cheap corn
shall have prospered like ourselves and increased their population
till corn is dear among them, then we shall be ruined. The evils of
scarcity are so dreadful that it is worth our while to give special
encouragements to agriculture, and, in order to be certain to have
enough, to have in general too much.[560] Otherwise “we shall be laid
so bare to the shafts of fortune that nothing but a miracle can save us
from being struck.”[561] “If England continues yearly her importations
of corn, she cannot ultimately escape that decline which seems to be
the natural and necessary consequence of excessive commercial
wealth; and the growing prosperity of those countries which supply
her with corn must in the end diminish her population, her riches,
and her power,”—not indeed in the next twenty or thirty years, but
“in the next two hundred or three hundred.”[562] In 1803 Malthus had
much in common with the author of Great Britain independent of
Commerce, to say nothing of the French economists. He cannot be
said to have entirely lost the bias in favour of Agriculture in later
years. In the Political Economy, reviewing the last five centuries of
English work and wages,[563] he tries to explain away the instances
where rising prices of corn and an “influx of bullion” seem to have
injured the condition of the labourer; and there can be little doubt he
was indirectly answering an objection to Corn Laws. When
depreciation of the currency, whether through American discoveries
or suspensions of cash payment, has occurred, the rebound from it
(he says) has made prices fall much more than wages, and so (we are
to infer), when prices are kept high, wages will follow. It may be
doubted if he had weighed the full consequences of such a contention
in the light of his own principles of free trade. Professor Rogers[564]
has had the valuable aid of old College accounts. Malthus had little
besides Eden, Arthur Young, and the Reports to the Board of
Agriculture; and it is doubtful if he fully understood the effects on
the labourer of Henry VII.’s debasement of the currency, or could
apply the analogy to the depreciation in his own day.[565] But on the
whole, as years went on, he became less physiocratic. He came to
acknowledge that, if a purely agricultural country might in some
cases, like America, be the best possible for the labourer, it might in
other cases, like Poland or Ireland, be the worst possible for him. If
we hear that the labourer in one country earns in a year fifteen and in
another nine quarters of wheat, we cannot be sure that the former is
the better off till we know the value of other things in the country in
comparison with wheat. If manufactures were very dear in
comparison, then the labourer’s wages except in food would go very
little way, unless in a case like America, where the quantity is so
great that it makes up for the little value of corn wages. In Poland the
value of corn is so low, and there is so little capital in the country,
that the high corn wages mean low real wages, and the population is
either stationary or very slow in its increase. The prosperity of an
agricultural country, then, depends on other causes than the
direction of its attention to the one industry of agriculture, and
without knowing these we could not infer or predict it.[566]
Malthus in fact reached the point at which he was always glad to
arrive, the medium between two extreme views.[567] He would neither
approve of a purely agricultural nation, whose danger was want of
capital, nor of a purely commercial, whose danger was want of food.
In a purely commercial, everything depends on a superiority in
industry, machinery, and trade, which from the nature of things
cannot last. Not only foreign but domestic competition will bring
down profits, and thereby, by discouraging saving and enterprise,
diminish the demand for labour and bring the population to a
standstill. Christendom has seen Venice, Bruges, Holland lose their
trade by their neighbours’ gain.[568] To say that the nations of the
world ought to be allowed to develope their trade as freely as the
provinces of a single empire, is, in his opinion, to overlook the reality
of political obstacles. If England were still separated into the
kingdoms of the Heptarchy, London could not be what it is. The
interest of a province and the interest of an independent state are
never the same.[569] To one who believes political divisions inevitable,
there can be little hope for universal free trade. Malthus is unable to
rise to the cosmopolitan view of Cobden, and he never seems to see
that by ignoring political barriers, free trade may really weaken
them. His ideal is a state which combines agriculture and commerce
in equal proportions.[570] The prosperity of the latter implies the
decay of feudalism and the establishment of secure government; with
security comes the spontaneous extension of enterprise and a steady
demand for labour. Since the two great classes of producers provide
a market for each other, wealth will constantly grow, and without
risk of sudden check by a foreign influence. The prosperity of such a
country may (he thinks) last practically for ever, and we might
answer in the affirmative for our own country the query of Bishop
Berkeley about his.[571] “The countries which unite great landed
resources with a prosperous state of commerce and manufactures,
and in which the commercial part of the population never essentially
exceeds the agricultural part, are eminently secure from sudden
reverses. Their increasing wealth seems to be out of the reach of all
common accidents, and there is no reason to say that they might not
go on increasing in riches and population for hundreds, nay almost
thousands of years.”[572] They would go on in fact till they reached the
extreme practical limits of population, which under the system of
private property would mean such a state of the land as would
“enable the last employed labourers to produce the maintenance of
as many probably as four persons,” the man, his wife, and two
children. As soon as the labour ceases to produce more than this, it
ceases to be worth the employer’s while to give the wages and employ
the labour. These practical limits are far from the limits of the earth’s
power to produce food, and a Government which compelled every
member of society to devote himself wholly to the raising of food and
necessaries, would succeed in coming nearer to those farther limits,
though at the expense of everything we mean by civilization.[573] As a
matter of fact, even the practical limit is not approached by way of a
uniform decline of profits and of population. Various causes, acting
at irregular intervals, stave off the event. The decline of general
profits, the introduction of long leases and large farming, would
bring more capital to the land; improvements in agriculture will
increase the produce, inventions in manufacture will lessen the cost
of the agriculturist’s comforts, and make his wages and profits go
farther; the opening of a foreign market may raise home prices; a
temporary rise in the value of agricultural produce may stimulate the
investment of capital in farming. So Malthus concludes, for reasons
not unlike Cliffe Leslie’s,[574] that, though there is a tendency of
profits to fall, yet the tendency is often defeated. Though there is
much truth still in many of his statements, the conclusion he draws
from them,[575] that we ought by a judicious system of corn duties and
corn bounties to keep the price of food steady and secure a large
home supply, is quite out of court now. The variations in price have
been under free trade very moderate; and the supply from one
quarter or another has never failed us. Free trade is no longer among
our problems.
It must be added, however, that there is no reason why the
“practical limits” should not exist under a paternal or fraternal
socialism as well as under the present social system. Even if industry
were initiated and directed not by individuals but socialistically by
Government, the sole motive need not be to increase the mere
numbers of the people, and therefore the mere total quantity of food
needed for a bare life. The motive of socialistic government would be
to secure a high degree of comfort, not a bare subsistence, for all; and
therefore, at the cost of a limitation of numbers, society would still
remain at a distance from its greatest possible production of food.
Whether such a limitation of numbers is likely to take place in the
reconstituted society is discussed elsewhere.[576]
 CHAPTER II.
THE WORKING MAN.
Measure of Value, 1823—In what sense Labour a Measure—
Difficulties—Arguments of the Tract on Value—Measure in the
same Country—Measure in different Countries—Measure at
different Periods in the same—Measure as applied to varying
Value of Currency—The Royal Literary Society—The Definitions
—Wages—The Minimum of Social different from the Minimum
of Physical Necessaries—High Wages, how made Permanent—
The “Wages Fund,” whose Invention, and how far a Reality
—“The New School of Political Economy,” its three Tenets—A
General Glut in what Sense possible.

As the Rent and Corn pamphlets deal chiefly with Mother Earth,
the tract on the Measure of Value[577] deals chiefly with Father Work.
The search for a common measure of value is not, to Malthus, a
purely academical problem. He considers such a measure desirable
because in any inquiry into the wealth of nations it is important to
distinguish between the rise of one commodity and the fall of
another. The former is an intrinsic alteration of value which will
affect every exchange in which the object is concerned; the latter an
extrinsic which affects only the one exchange, of the object in
question with the foreign object that has been altered. By value of
course is to be understood economic value, or “the power of
commanding other objects in exchange,” not value in the (not
uncommon) wider sense, of usefulness in supplying wants.[578] The
economic value of anything, taken in relation to some object which
never changes its value from intrinsic causes, may be called the
“natural or absolute value” of that thing, and the object with which it
was compared may be called the “measure” of absolute or natural
value, in other words, of the value which a thing must fetch if its
supply is to be continued. While not only money but any and every
object may be such a measure of value for a limited place and time,
even money itself is not a good measure for widely different places or
for long periods of time; and corn, which is better for long periods, is
worse for short.
 Labour is better than either, but Labour is ambiguous. We may
measure the value of anything either by the labour it has cost us in
the making of it, which gives us Ricardo’s sense of natural value, or
by the labour it will purchase after it is made. Adam Smith,[579] who
preferred labour both to money and corn as the measure of value,
wavered between these two meanings of the terms. Malthus declares
at once against the first sense. Labour, he says, in the sense of cost
does not altogether determine value and therefore cannot measure it,
even for similar places and times. In 1820 Malthus had been of
opinion that a mean between corn and labour was a better measure
of value than labour itself; but since 1823 he recurred to the view of
Adam Smith,[580] and held that the amount of the unskilled common
day labour of the agricultural labourer, which a thing will purchase
or command, is a good measure of the value of it even at widely
different places and times. “Agricultural labour is taken for the
obvious reasons that it is the commonest species of labour, that it
directly produces the food of the labourer, and that it is the most
immediately connected with the gradations of soil and the necessary
variations of profits. It is also assumed with Adam Smith, Mr.
Ricardo, and other political economists, that, on an average, other
kinds of labour continue to bear the same proportions to agricultural
labour.”[581] The bodily exertion of the labourer does not change; it is
the same sweat of the brow, the same sacrifice of physical force.
When corn, for example, will command a less amount of labour than
it would have done a century before, we may be sure it is because of a
change not in the labour but in the corn; and we ought therefore to
say not that labour has risen in value, but that corn has fallen.
Malthus’ search for a permanent element in the changeable has led
him to individual human labour as the economical unit. If the
Chinese labourer has lower wages than the English, it is not because
his labour is of lower value, but because his necessaries are of higher.
Wages are higher in the United States not because labour is of higher
value, but because necessaries are of lower.[582] Of course when skill
enters into the labour, the unit is not the same; but, when we look
only at unskilled, we find confirmation of Malthus’ view in the
experience of the elder and the younger Brassey as employers of
labour, that quantity for quantity “the cost of the labour [the expense
of it to the employer] is the same everywhere” over the world.[583] The
measure, however, is by no means out of court as regards skilled
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