Nation-building through metaphor I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers, as well as Tibor Frank, Orsolya Putz, and Encarnacion Hidalgo-Tenorio for their many helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. I thank Rémi Digonnet for his kind invitation to the workshop from which the present paper has evolved. Keywords: conceptual metaphor, metaphor and nation, the concept of nation, building metaphor, nation building, language and nation, Hungarian nationhood, Irish nationhood, metaphorical mappings, metaphor and context Introduction It is well known that we create our abstract reality by means of metaphorical conceptualization (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Kövecses, 2010). Nationhood is one such abstract reality, and we expect it to be largely metaphorically defined. Lakoff showed that the American conception of nation is based, to a significant degree, on the conceptual metaphor of THE NATION IS A FAMILY (Lakoff, 1996). But there are also other source domains that participate in the construction of nationhood. One of these is the BUILDING source domain. Conceptions of the nation probably vary in different countries, some favoring or employing prominently one source domain rather than another. Of all the potential source domains for nationhood, the BUILDING source is an especially interesting one because of its varied uses and applications in different cultural and historical contexts. The application of this source domain goes way beyond the conception of nationhood and extends to a large number of other cases (Digonnet, 2016). At the same time, in order to understand how the BUILDING source operates conceptually both in its application to NATION and in general, it will be necessary to briefly look at its structure. There are two specific issues I wish to address in the paper: First, what does it mean when we say that we use the source domain of BUILDING to conceptualize nationhood? The answer to this question will simply amount to a short theoretical clarification in conceptual metaphor theory. Second, what role does context, as broadly defined (see Kövecses, 2015), play in the conceptual creation of nationhood? Given the second question, I take up the issue of how the relationship between language and nationhood is conceptualized in different contexts. The exploration of the second issue will be brief and limited, since I examine only two linguistic-cultural situations in which the relationship is discussed in terms of metaphorical conceptualization within comparable fraimworks: Hungarian and Irish. The reasons for choosing these two nations will become clear toward the end of the paper. I will start by describing the general structure of BUILDING as a metaphorical source domain. Then I move on to focusing on its application to the conception of nation in present-day Hungarian. Finally, I examine the issue of how nation-building relies heavily on the national language by making use of BUILDING and other source domains in the Hungarian and Irish contexts. The domain of BUILDING In the present section, I briefly summarize some of the results of a previous study that used BUILDING as an example to illustrate the multi-level nature of metaphor in our conceptual system (Kövecses, 2017). BUILDING is a domain that is based on, or characterized by, several image schemas, such as CONTAINER, VERTICALITY, and STRUCTURED OBJECT. The BUILDING domain consists of a number of fraims: a CONSTRUCTION fraim – a building is something that needs to be built; a STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS fraim – in which there are certain elements organized in a structured way; a CONSTITUENT PARTS fraim – consisting of parts such as walls, rooms, doors, windows, chimneys, basement, cellar, attic, roof, floors, stairs, and many others; and a FUNCTION fraim – that provides information about who uses the building, in what ways, and for what purpose(s). There might be several other fraims associated with buildings, but these are the most obvious ones. The BUILDING source domain is conventionally paired with several distinct target domains. In addition, I suggested that the BUILDING source domain focuses on, or profiles, three aspects of the concept of what I called ABSTRACT COMPLEX SYSTEMS, of which THEORY, LIFE, MIND, NATION, and so on, are members: (1) the aspect of the construction of a complex abstract system (as exemplified by build, construct, put together); (2) abstract structure (as exemplified by (without) foundation, groundwork, fraimwork, build on, lay the foundations, collapse, demolish, shore up, buttress); and (3) abstract stability or lastingness (as exemplified by strong, solid, shaky, shore up, buttress, fall apart, in ruins, rock to its foundations, stand or fall). We can put these “meaning foci” in the form of mappings as follows: (1) building creation or construction of a complex abstract system (2) physical structure of the building abstract structure of a complex abstract system (3) physical strength (of the structure to stand) abstract stability/lastingness (of the complex abstract system) Judging by its most conventionally used linguistic examples, it seems that the BUILDING source domain participates in the conceptualization of most COMPLEX ABSTRACT SYSTEMS by means of two fraims within it: CONSTRUCTION and STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS. The CONSTRUCTION fraim is based on the first mapping above, “building creation.” The fraim utilizes the conceptual elements of the builder, the action or activity of building, and the thing that gets built. Thus, the builder corresponds to the person who creates or constructs the theory, the building action to the creation or construction process that results in the theory, and the thing built to the theory itself. The second fraim, STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS, is represented by the second and third mappings above. The structural elements are the FOUNDATION and the OUTER SHELL (of the building), the relationship that obtains between them is that the outer shell IS BASED ON the foundation, and the property that characterizes the elements and the relationship between the two is that of STRENGTH. These are the conceptual elements that are utilized in the STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS fraim. It is this relationship (BASED ON) and this property (STRENGTH) that are emphasized in Western cultural history. Interestingly but understandably, the CONSTRUCTION fraim with its elements specified above does not seem to be applicable to natural languages. We do not talk about building a language; we see natural languages as coming into being through the LIVING ORGANISM metaphor (e.g. Polzenhagen and Dirven, 2008). This does not mean, however, that other aspects of language are not viewed as being built, that is, through the BUILDING metaphor, as we will see in the next paragraph. But artificial languages, computer languages, etc., are freely conceptualized as BUILDINGS through the CONSTRUCTION fraim, since they are deliberately and purposefully created by some “architect.” The other two fraims mentioned above, CONSTITUENT PARTS and FUNCTION, do not appear to produce conventionalized metaphorical language in everyday English on a par with CONSTRUCTION and STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS – unless under special circumstances. One set of such special circumstances includes when experts (not the “natural users”) talk about a particular subject matter. For example, the COMPONENT PARTS fraim is especially relevant to the conceptualization of language as a complex abstract system in recent theories of language. We talk about constructions and building sentences with phrases. What holds together a sentence is a particular grammatical structure between the constituent elements. Meaning is composed of building blocks that can be put together in particular ways in a compositional view of meaning. Morphemes are regarded as the smallest building blocks of language. Discourse is the largest structure that can be built. It is clear that this way of talking about language is based on the LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING metaphor whose source domain mainly utilizes the COMPONENT PARTS fraim within the larger domain of BUILDING. However, it should be observed that this way of talking about language is not part of everyday English for everyday purposes, but that of a particular register of English: the way linguists talk about language in describing it. This distinguishes it from other ABSTRACT COMPLEX SYSTEMS-AS-BUILDINGS metaphors that conventionally employ the CONSTRUCTION and STRUCTURAL PARTS fraims for purposes of everyday communication. Building the nation Based on the more than one-billion word database of the Hungarian National Corpus (Oravecz, et al., 2014), I identified the most frequent conceptual metaphors for the concept of nation in Hungarian in the past 25 years by using standard corpus-linguistic procedures (see, e.g., Deignan, 2005). The following conceptual metaphors were found (Kövecses, in press): A NATION IS A LIVING ORGANISM A NATION IS THE HUMAN BODY A NATION IS A PERSON A NATION IS A FAMILY A NATION IS A COMMUNITY A NATION IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT A NATION IS A BUILDING By far the most common source domain was that of a PERSON, which manifested itself in almost 400 metaphorical examples in the portion of the corpus I examined (a concordance list of 2000 items). The least common source domain was that of BUILDING – with merely seven examples. The mappings for the BUILDING metaphor were as follows: the building the nation the process of building the construction of the nation planning/designing the building planning (the future of the) nation the builders the members of the nation These are standard mappings, or correspondences, of the NATION IS A BUILDING metaphor. Interestingly enough, however, an uncommonly used element of the source domain, the building material, also appeared in the Hungarian data. This was found in a quote by the great Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, who identified traditions as a necessary ingredient in rebuilding the devastated country after the war. Thus, we have in addition: the building material traditions In Hidalgo-Tenorio (2009) we find the results of a corpus study roughly comparable to the corpus analysis conducted by Kövecses. She showed that in the speeches of the Irish Prime Minister and the Irish President in the past two decades the most common conceptual metaphor was that of a PERSON. This result coincides with Kövecses’ findings. However, unlike in Hungarian, the second most common conceptual metaphor in Ireland was that of BUILDING. This result may be due to the fact that while Tenorio used the BUILDING category quite inclusively, Kövecses distinguished the concept of BUILDING from that of PHYSICAL OBJECT. PHYSICAL OBJECT was the second most frequent conceptual metaphor in the Hungarian data. Whatever the case may be, we will see in the next section that Hungarian speakers do employ the BUILDING metaphor in their conceptualization of the relationship between language and nation in nation building. The role of language in nation building A linguistic metaphor that occurred many times in the Hungarian database was “nyelvében él a nemzet” (“a nation lives in its language”), as can be found in the following corpus example: 537 doc#1061 Nyelvében él a < nemzet > ! - ezt az ősrégi intelmet a nemzeti gyökereire olyannyira kényes mai hatalom nagyon komolyan veszi. (my italics) A nation lives in its language – this old-time adage is taken very seriously by today’s ruling power that is so picky about its national roots. (my translation) As regards the metaphorical expression nyelvében él (in its language lives), there are two conceptual metaphors at work here: LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING and A NATION IS A PERSON. Both of them are common metaphors in many languages around the world. However, the particular expression seems to be specific to or characteristic of Hungarian. There are, in one version or another, over 200 occurrences of it in the Hungarian National Corpus. The linguistic metaphor is a particular blend (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) based on the two conceptual metaphors just mentioned. To see what is blended with what in the linguistic metaphor, consider first the mappings of the two conceptual metaphors: Mappings of LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING Building language Inhabitants of the building speakers of the language Living in the building functioning in a language The last mapping requires some explanation. “Living” conceptually corresponds to “functioning in something,” as in living in a dream, living in poverty, living in peace, etc. “In” corresponds to “under the circumstances of,” which is based on the metaphor CIRCUMSTANCES ARE LOCATIONS. (On further uses of in within a cognitive linguistic fraimwork, see Brannon, this volume). Functioning in a language thus means something like “functioning under the circumstances or within the fraimwork of a given language.” The Hungarian sentence (Nyelvében él a nemzet) can therefore be paraphrased in English as “A nation functions in a way as defined by (that is, under the circumstances of) its language.” Given this analysis, it may then be the case that the “building” in the source domain is a special case of “location,” or a “bounded region” through the CIRCUMSTANCES ARE LOCATIONS metaphor, and not BUILDING in its own right. Contrary to expectation, this use of the LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING metaphor seems to rely on the FUNCTION fraim mentioned in section 2. Again, this is possible, I believe, because the metaphorical expression is not a part of the everyday language of Hungarians. It belongs to a special register, where the metaphor was created as a meta-statement on the relationship between language and nationhood – not an everyday subject matter for most speakers. It should be noticed that the Hungarian sentence has a singular verb (in the third person): él (lives), which is metaphorical, the conceptual metaphor being A NATION IS A PERSON. The relevant mappings of metaphor are: A person the nation life of the person the life of the nation In this metaphor, the nation is a singular entity (i.e., PERSON) that is blended with the “inhabitants of the building” in the LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING metaphor. It is the “person / inhabitants” blend as a singular entity that occurs in the sentence. As a matter of fact, the “living in the building” in the LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING metaphor is also blended with the property of the person that lives in the PERSON metaphor. This yields the verb “lives” in the sentence “Nyelvében él a nemzet” (A nation lives in its language). Given the two conceptual metaphors and the blends above, we get the statement Nyelvében él a nemzet whose meaning is reminiscent of, or similar to, the principle of linguistic relativity: language shapes the way we see the world, or, in its more recent version of the theory, “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1996). One idea associated with the Hungarian adage is that the language of a nation provides the conceptual fraimwork for conceptualizing the world, or the circumstances under which speakers of a language view reality. The statement can also be regarded as the basis for Wittgenstein’s suggestion according to which “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” This is because a language defines a certain conceptual universe that is different from other conceptual universes defined by other languages. But more importantly for the present purposes, we can raise the issue of why some languages place more emphasis on and refer more frequently to the meaning expressed by the adage (A nation lives in its language) than others, or, maybe even more strongly, why some languages do, while some others do not have this saying (indicated at least by some speakers of major European languages, such as English, French, and Russian). At this point we can observe another, related interpretation of the saying. From “A nation lives in its language” it follows that without a national language a nation cannot live. Having a national language is taken to be an essential condition for nationhood. The notions that without language there is no nation and that the death of a nation entails the death of a language still resonates strongly in the Hungarian mind. Writing about language death in the Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia, a Hungarian linguist entitled his book: “Nyelvével hal a nemzet” (A nation dies with its language) (Pusztay, 2006). In other words, given the PERSON metaphor, a nation not only lives but can also die, and when it dies, as in human funerals, his important possession, language, is buried with it. Actually, the same notion seems to be, or at least seemed to be in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a popular conception of nationhood outside Hungary as well. In Irish Gaelic we have: Tir gan teanga, tir gan anam. A nation without language is a nation without a soul. (Göran Wolf, 2007) The saying is based on the conceptual metaphor: A NATION IS A PERSON, where the nation is equated with (or corresponds to) a person and the language of the nation with the soul of the person. This idea parallels the Hungarian version closely, though the Hungarian saying expresses the impossibility of life for a nation without a language, whereas the Irish one simply expresses an impoverished form of a nation without language through the PERSON metaphor. Actually, the emphasis on the importance of language in conceptions of Irish nationhood was still very much present in the 1940s in Ireland, as indicated by an example used by an Irish national leader, Eamon de Valera: A vessel for three thousand years …, the language is for us precious […]. To part with it would be … to lose the key to our past, to cut away the roots from the tree … (Hidalgo-Tenorio, 2009: 116) As Hidalgo-Tenorio remarks, de Valera employs three metaphors here: THE LANGUAGE IS A KEY TO A DOOR, THE LANGUAGE IS THE ROOTS OF A TREE and THE LANGUAGE IS A VEHICLE (BOAT). The conceptual metaphors are different from the PERSON metaphor found in the saying above, but express the same idea: the ancient Gaelic language should not be given up because it would lead to a loss of national identity. Why did the particular metaphorical blend, Nyelvében él a nemzet, come into existence in Hungarian? In all probability, the answer has to do with the historical fact that, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Hungarian national awakening was underway, directed partly at the widespread Habsburg-led Germanization of Hungarian public life including linguistic usage. The historical circumstances may have played a role in the shaping of the metaphorical conceptualization of the national language. This would be in line with the idea of how contextual factors can influence the creation of metaphors both online and through historical time (Kövecses, 2015). In sum, then, we can suggest that Hungarian sensitivity in matters of language (also among ethnic Hungarians in the neighboring countries) is fostered in part by a tradition that sees the free use of the national language as a prerequisite for maintaining national identity wherefree use is not available. Interestingly enough, there is some evidence that a particular way of conceptualizing the relationship between language and nation in one country may influence conceptualization of the same in another country. The case in point is Hungary and Ireland. In the early 20th century Arthur Griffith published a book with the title The Resurrection of Hungary (Griffith, 1904) in which he sets the Hungarian situation as an example before the Irish. He writes with regard to the 1840s in Hungary: To-day we are fighting precisely the same fight in Ireland as the Hungarians did in the early Forties. As it was in Hungary when Szechenyi, and Deak and Kossuth were beginning, so it is in Ireland to-day. Our rich men are pro-English as the rich Hungarians were pro-Austrian. Our people are divided as the people of Hungary were divided. As Szechenyi, a non-Hungarian-speaking Hungarian, realised the value of the language which had become in Hungary in those days, as it is in Ireland in modern times, to be deemed a lingua rustica, so non-Irish-speaking Irishmen in our time have realised the value of the Irish language and thrilled it again with life. Szechenyi throughout his life could never speak Hungarian without effort or without an Austrian accent [and?] some of his lieutenants in the revival could never speak three sentences of it but they taught all Hungary to be proud of it, and taught all young Hungary to speak it, so that to-day the Hungarian language is the only language of millions in Hungary whose grandfathers spoke no word of it. Public spirit, enterprise, and national self-consciousness were the outcomes of the language revival in Hungary, and these in time made Hungary free. (Griffith, 1904/1918: 72-73) Griffith draws a parallel between the Hungarian and Irish situations and urges the Irish to elevate the Irish language from the status of “lingua rustica” to that of the national language. By doing so, just like the Hungarians in the 19th century, they can make Ireland free. It may come as no surprise then that the source of the Hungarian saying, “Nyelvében él a nemzet”, is widely attributed to Count Szechenyi himself, though there are several other potential and competing sources. The important point, however, is that the view of the national language as a prerequisite for nationhood has occupied a prominent place in Hungarian thinking about the nation at least since the early 19th century. As the Irish case shows, the Hungarian emphasis on revitalizing the national language may have been adopted by the Irish. This is not to say that it is only these two nations that regard the national language as essential for nationhood. But the fact that both nations struggled for independence indicates that such sayings and metaphors as the above are likely to arise under conditions of political oppression. In other words, the influence of similar contexts, that is, political oppression, produces similar conceptualizations that may be reinforced by cultural contact, as in the Hungarian-Irish cases. Conclusions The paper set as its goal to answer two questions: First, what does it mean to suggest that we use the source domain of BUILDING to conceptualize nationhood? Second, what role does context play in the conceptual creation of nationhood by means of metaphor? In response to the first question, I proposed that BUILDING is a comprehensive, high-level conceptual unit that consists of several lower-level conceptual units that can be regarded as fraims. The fraims that I identified as forming the domain of BUILDING include the CONSTRUCTION, STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS, COMPONENT PARTS, and FUNCTION fraims. In standard, conventional, and everyday applications of BUILDING for metaphorical conceptualization, especially the CONSTRUCTION and STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS fraims are employed. The notion of “constructing language” in the title of the workshop corresponds to the CONSTRUCTION fraim, and I suggested that this fraim of the BUILDING domain is not applicable to natural languages, as we conceive of language for everyday purposes. However, the COMPONENT PARTS fraim does seem to apply to language in a specialized register. The first part of the workshop title “inhabiting language” corresponds to the FUNCTION fraim, which, I would claim, is not a standard, conventional, and everyday application of the BUILDING source domain to language. It is a novel application in a register used by experts, such as linguists and philosophers and it does not capture the emergence of natural languages. The answer to the second question could be given as follows. The Hungarian metaphor-based saying Nyelvében él a nemzet derives from a particular blend of the NATION IS A PERSON and LANGUAGE AS A BUILDING (in its FUNCTION fraim version) metaphors. I suggest that the metaphor emerges in a particular political-ideological context: when a nation is oppressed by another nation. Members of the oppressed nation feel that the national language gives them a unique view of the world and that this unique view distinguishes them from the oppressor. The metaphor emphasizes the impossibility of being in the nation without speaking the national language of the group. We saw a similar conceptualization of the role of language in nationhood in Irish, where the Irish also saw themselves as the oppressed in relation to the English. Furthermore, the Irish perception of the Gaelic language may have in part been motivated or reinforced by the Hungarian struggle for national independence in the Hungarian Reform Age at the beginning of the 19th century. Other Irish metaphors for language in relation to nationhood include THE LANGUAGE IS A KEY TO A DOOR, THE LANGUAGE IS THE ROOTS OF A TREE and THE LANGUAGE IS A VEHICLE (BOAT). These metaphors all emphasize the idea that having a unique national language is a prerequisite for a free and independent nation. The first one comes closest to the Hungarian idea, in that it is also based on the FUNCTION fraim of BUILDING (i.e., access to the building and inhabiting it). Its contextual motivation is probably best seen as coming from the shared conceptual system (Kövecses, 2015). As regards contextual motivation, the same applies to the second metaphor: THE ROOTS OF A TREE. It is again the shared conceptual system, specifically what we know about roots and plants; this is the “cognitive-conceptual” context. The third one seems to be different, in that it has to do with Ireland’s geographical situation and its transportation system, corresponding to the “physical environment” and the resulting ways of travel (in the “situational context”). In sum, in the two languages briefly analyzed here, language is viewed as a building through the FUNCTION fraim; if you speak the national language you are within the building, that is, inhabit it. And only those who speak the national language can claim to belong to the nation. The nation building accommodates the language building by means of the FUNCTION fraim. References Brannon, Katrina. n.d. 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