The CERLIS Journal: Studies in Specialized Languages and Discourse Analysis, Special Issue: Metaphorical Meaning between Legitimation and Comprehension: Political Discourse and Multilingual Education across Cultures, January 2026

This special issue of CERLIS Journal, which originates from the international CERLIS 2025 conference Metaphors in Specialized Discourses In and Across Cultures, brings together three original studies on metaphor in specialised and institutional discourse, followed by a miscellanea contribution on tourism discourse. The three metaphor studies share a conviction that figurative language is a cognitive and discursive instrument rather than an ornament, but they observe it in two distinct conditions. Part I examines metaphor as a resource for the legitimation of political power, through the officially curated interpretation of classical quotations in Xi Jinping’s discourse and through the metaphorical representation of the Russian state in the presidential inaugural addresses of El’cin, Medvedev and Putin. Part II turns from the production of metaphorical meaning to its reception, through the comprehension of textbook metaphors by multilingual students in German lower secondary education. Across both parts, the contributions converge on three points: the primacy of an expression’s basic meaning as the precondition for metaphorical meaning to be recognised or inferred; the role of institutional and interactional mediation in stabilising what a metaphor is taken to mean; and the value of close, qualitative reconstruction alongside replicable identification procedures. The miscellanea article, a mixed-methods pilot study of travel influencers’ Instagram captions, extends the issue’s concern with discourse, persuasion and self-presentation to the tourism domain. This introduction frames the collection, presents each contribution critically, and identifies cross-cutting themes and limitations.