Based on two corpora composed of four discourse genres each - spoken interviews, written interviews, newspaper articles and non-fictional books - the article focuses on the way one speaks metaphorically about 'society' in current German and Brazilian discourse. The study reveals that the image schemas tend to be more mixed and dynamic in the German corpus as compared to the Brazilian one and that the conceptual metaphors -business, building, game, and observation - are more frequent, whereas in the Brazilian corpus, there is a more extensive use of personification, stage, flora, family, and war. In a second step, motivated by a more microanalytic and communicative approach, we turn our attention to 'highlighting' and 'hiding' effects connected to certain ideological backgrounds, strategic aims and speech functions linked to the preference of certain metaphors.
Conceptual metaphors; image schemas; society
