"And, so today, a new season of American renewal has begun." A Critical Metaphor Analysis of NEWNESS in American Presidential Discourse.

This book-length study examines the importance of the concept of NEWNESS in American presidential discourse, with a focus on the inaugural address as a major institutionalised form of public address on the American political calendar. Throughout its seven themed chapters, this doctoral thesis reconceptualises the inaugural as an epideictic genre with the dual function of cultural transmission and political renewal. In line with constructivist theorising on meaning, it is argued that the very concept of NEWNESS furnishes considerable ideological potential which is used strategically in the inaugural address to build a communicative memory. After setting the stage, in chapter 1, for an account of American political discourse that is shaped by the appropriation of newness to construct an identity as a ‘new nation’ of the ‘new world’, chapter 2 goes on to expose the interdisciplinary nature of political discourse in laying the foundations for a dynamic conception of meaning representation in discourse as the product of individual and collective mental processes. Chapter 3 moves on to track the development of the concept of NEWNESS against the backdrop of the generational cycles of American national history, focusing on the important notion of ‘covenant’. Covenant theology became one of the cornerstones of the American tradition of public oratory, which itself has been reported to be one of the main contributing factors to the rise of the ‘rhetorical presidency’. Chapters 4 to 6 form the centrepiece of the qualitative analysis of NEWNESS as a powerful lexical and conceptual resource in framing American presidential discourse. The conceptual domain of NEWNESS is fully fleshed out in chapter 4, which begins by outlining its conceptual history and subsequently highlights its importance as a cognitive cultural model. When encoded in a language-specific format, for example as the adjective new, the analysis revealed that the meaning potential of new clustered around two major semantic subsets: Newness may, on the one hand, be understood in terms of time and origin or may be expressed in terms of kind and quality on the other. Not only do these construals highlight the lexical concept’s polysemy, they also demonstrate that the meaning potential of new is grounded in temporal and spatial cognition. As such, the cognitive domain of NEWNESS is metaphorically structured and is conceptually linked to the concept of CHANGE. Cognitively, both are united in the complex system of the Event Structure Metaphor (ESM), whose central mapping is the conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION. In chapter 5, the inaugural address, which makes up the database of the present study, is introduced as a specific genre of presidential speech, including its main communicative functions, and followed by a reconceptualisation of the inaugural address as an epideictic genre. Prior to the in-depth qualitative analysis of the entrenchment of NEWNESS in the American presidential inaugural address, the analytical procedures are established. The analysis in chapter 6 had two main objectives: It first involved examining the construal of NEWNESS in presidential discourse on the basis of all nineteenth-century and twentieth-century inaugural speeches. The second part aimed at uncovering the mechanisms of how this particular construal may contribute to the representation of ideological discourse structures on both the sentence and textual levels. Results showed that, while in nineteenth-century inaugurals the construal of NEWNESS chiefly serves to encode specific participant roles, such as the American nation as an agent, the sentential event schemas identified in the twentieth-century speeches tend to invoke the contrast between the categories OLD and NEW by means of antonym construal. This patterning gives rise to antagonistic frames, which assign positive values to ‘new’ and negative values to ‘old’. The analysis of larger portions of discourse revealed that meaning representation in the inaugural address largely occurs on the basis of motion concepts, including the conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION as the central mapping of the ESM. As shown, these metaphorical frames help entrench ideological structures, which operate both locally and globally in presidential discourse by expressing opposing value judgements about the presence or absence of CHANGE and NEWNESS, respectively. The thesis concludes that the concept of NEWNESS provides a powerful conceptual frame for what may be considered the inaugural’s most crucial rhetorical function, that is, the transmission of core values of the American public philosophy or civil religion. Conceptual metaphor proved to be a suitable analytical tool for identifying the knowledge structures that underpin political cognition, entrenched as cognitive models in which information about beliefs, values and social practices is stored