Abstract

The paper aims to find out how multilingualism, as one of the major issues on the European agenda, is perceived in the European Union, i.e. what metaphors the EU officials use when they talk about LANGUAGE. The small-scale study is based on press releases and speeches of the EU Commissioner for Multilingualism, as well as on several reports on the issue, which provides a broader institutional backdrop against which the metaphors are set in. On the basis of selected metaphorical expressions, several conceptual mappings, such as LANGUAGE IS A CONSTRUCTION, LANGUAGE IS BUSINESS, LANGUAGE IS A PERSON are identified and discussed regarding their potential pragmatic role in a sense that metaphors are used persuasively to convey certain socio-political evaluations. The aim of this study is to try to identify whether verbal evidence derived from metaphorical expressions may constitute some ideas whose potential implications we are not aware of