Xiaojuan Tan

Winner Dissertation Prize 2024

Report by the selection committee

In recent decades, we have witnessed an increasing geopolitical tension between the US and China, which manifests itself in economic, political and military rivalries.    

In her dissertation Static and dynamic metaphoricity in U.S.-China trade discourse: A transdisciplinary perspective, Xiaojuan Tan makes an important, innovative and highly original contribution to the analysis and interpretation of the development of the trade war between the two superpowers.

The dissertation triangulates perspectives from international relations studies, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis. Moreover, in doing so, she combines quantitative, empirical research with qualitative-theoretical contributions. The quantitative, empirical part consists of an analysis of a large database of nearly 6 million words of government documents in both American English and Mandarin Chinese from the Clinton-Jiang period (1993-1997) and the Trump-Xi period (2017-2021). She not only applies existing analysis methods from corpus linguistics, but also develops a new method – a Cross-linguistic Metaphor Identification Procedure – that can be applied to both English and Chinese texts.

The qualitative-theoretical innovation lies mainly in the further development of cognitive metaphor theory, which started in the early 1980s with Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors we live by, according to which metaphors are not only and not primarily ornamental tropes, but perform important cognitive functions, by structuring our world thereby creating specific repertoires of action.

Tan’s innovative contribution to cognitive metaphor theory lies in particular in the application of the notion of ‘gradable metaphoricity’ to political discourse analysis, implying that the meaning of a metaphor is not static, but can change over time, as new metaphors often gradually become conventional ones, and living metaphors often end up as dead metaphors. She also demonstrates the role of the socio-political context in the transformation of a metaphor’s meaning.

Drawing on Asian philosophy, she refers to the reciprocal relations between static and dynamic metaphoricity and the diachronic development of metaphorical meaning as YinYang Dynamics or Metaphoricity in Discourse.

The discussion of the differences between and implications of each of the aforementioned types of gradeability outlines many ingredients required for a comprehensive political metaphor analysis and orients towards a thick dynamic metaphor approach to political discourse analysis.

Given these outstanding qualities, it is not surprising that Tan’s dissertation was awarded a cum laude by the doctoral committee, which consisted of specialists from Europe, the US and China in the fields of linguistics, discourse analysis, metaphor studies and international relations theory.

Nor is it surprising that the jury for the Dissertation Prizes 2024 of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation decided to award one of its five dissertation prizes to dr. Xiaojuan Tan.