Based on two corpora composed of four discourse genres - spoken interviews, written interviews, newspaper articles and non-fictional books - the article focuses on the way how 'society' is talked about metaphorically in current German and Brazilian discourse. We want to discuss mainly culture-specific 'mixed metaphors' (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980) which can be seen as blending scenarios or 'integration networks' in the sense of Fauconnier & Turner (2003, 2008). Furthermore, we shall also demonstrate that Blending Theory has to be extended by a semiotic-contextual view in order to integrate elements like the 'Relevance Space' (BRANDT; BRANDT, 2005) to grasp culture-dependent variation and the involved speech functions displayed by real speakers / writers and hearers / readers in specific communication situations.
Metaphorical blending; image schemas; integration networks; society
