In public political discourse, figurative expressions used by one participant are often followed up and 'countered' by other participants through ironical and/or sarcastic allusions or quotations, which are aimed at denouncing the preceding version and/or deriving a new, contrarian conclusion from it. What is the relationship between the figurative template expression and its ironical or sarcastic variants? Using data from a corpus documenting 25 years of debate in Britain about the nation's place at the heart of Europe, this paper investigates the interplay of metaphor, irony and sarcasm in public discourse. We show that the 'discourse career' of this metaphorical slogan bifurcates into two strands, i.e. an affirmative, optimistic use vs deriding and ridiculing uses that depict the heart of Europe as diseased, dead, non-existent or rotten. It is argued that discourse participants need to retain the optimistic template version as a reference point in discourse memory to achieve the intended ironical and/or sarcastic effects, and that the latter are essential to keep the metaphoricity of the slogan 'alive'. : discourse history, echoic utterance, follow-up, irony, metaphor, metarepresentation, quotation, sarcasm 2  Keywords The public debate surrounding the referendum on the United Kingdom's exit ("Brexit") from the European Union (EU) has witnessed a revival of sorts for a metaphorical slogan about Britain's relationship with the EU that had already been declared 'dead' several times, i.e. the contention that Britain is or should (not) be at the heart of Europe. Public voices opposing Brexit have used it as a slogan to suggest that Britain would be better off and should stay in the EU, as the following examples show: The use of the 'heart' concept to in statements conveying a negative evaluation of the EU in the latter examples may seem odd at first sight. Given the positive connotations of 'heart' in the ubiquitous phrase (at) the heart of, as well as in other idiomatic and proverbial sayings in English, 1 its assertive use, as in examples (1) -(3), seems much more likely. It is conventional and not metaphorically very vivid, with the 'heart' element denoting first and foremost the notion of 'centrality', and only weakly connoting a 'body'-related meaning. 2 So, what happens when the 'heart' element in the slogan is reinterpreted as a rotten 1 Niemeyer (2000) has shown that the conceptual motivation of HEART-based idioms and metaphors in English is predominantly positively biased, e.g. by qualifying the respective referents as essential, autonomous, valuable, and alive. Negatively biased idioms (cold heart, heart of stone) appear to be less frequent and restricted in usage. , vol. 1: 1213 and Roget's International Thesaurus, 1996 or unhealthy organ of a failing organism? This question gains a discoursehistorical dimension when we take into consideration that the slogan had its 'obituary' written as early as in 1994: In this passage, the author quotes an earlier statement by the then Conservative Prime Minister J. Major from three years earlier, in which Major had used the heart of Europe phrase to make an optimistic promise of a constructive engagement with the EU. Now, in 1994, his good intentions are sarcastically denounced by the Independent journalist through combining the quotation with the notion of a blood clot that could only kill the heart of Europe. This sarcastic denunciation in the last sentence confirms the verdict in the introductory statement about the heart-metaphor itself having died (ceased to beat): thus both the metaphor and its content are merged into one (allegedly) dying entity. As a metaphorical blend (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, pp. 126-131), 3 the passage is 3 The "blend' here is understood in the sense of a "double-scope network of conceptual integration, which allows for the combination of conflicting "mental spaces" (Fauconnier 1994) to generate an emergent new construction that need not be factually or logically consistent. This concept of "blend" is different from that developed by Pálinkás (2014) 5 so elaborate that its communicative effect must contain 'added value' to be worthwhile the extra comprehension effort by the reader. This is indeed the case: example (7) not only reproduces and extends the metaphor but provides a sarcastic commentary on the state the British EU-debates -at a time when "Brexit" still seemed a long way off. This article investigates the interplay between metaphor and sarcasm as well as irony with reference to a real-life usage corpus documenting the development of the slogan Britain at the heart of Europe over 25 years. Its aim is threefold: first, we will map out the 'discourse career' of this metaphorical slogan as a series of re-contextualisations that have affected its evaluative bias and resulted in two main opposite usage versions; secondly, we argue that even its ironical and/or sarcastic uses still presuppose the optimistic usage template, so that in a sense, the latter has never disappeared completely from the conceptual "scenario" that is evoked by the metaphor, and thirdly, we propose a distinction between ironical and sarcastic uses that is based on their relationship to the preceding 'template' use (rather than treating sarcasm just as an 'insulting' form of irony). Metaphor, irony and sarcasm as "figures of speech"
Musoff REF used categorical falsity as metaphor and the contradictory as irony/sarcasm to find out the distinction between irony and sarcasm.
Metaphor, irony and sarcasm in public discourse
Journal of Pragmatics
Sociology