The concept of a HOUSE can be used to indicate two different phenomena with very broad meanings; namely, a house as a HOME with inhabitants – invoking images of an indoor space, a concept of a house as a home for a family, and a HOUSE AS A BUILDING/STRUCTURE, making its parts very important – suggesting architectural interpretation, including the idea of a space that provides protection, and guarantee stability. The metaphorical concept is shifting from a construction to the residents inside the construction, which is further followed by the various social patterns and duties within the household. We can further conclude that politicians tend to generate the support of citizens by conveying very close relations, and thus, through this kind of bounding, they are capable of evoking emotional ties modelled on family relationships (Tomović-Šundić & Gvozdenović, 2020: 7). Understood as a family, the state comes to exist in a location which can be compared to a ‘house’. The metaphorical model of a state mapped to a house makes us understand similarities between these two concepts. House is imagined as something secure, bright, and safe. It is something that we, as a family, need, as to make a home. Its emphasis is on security and self-assured identity. It is something more than a physical space. A house is not a home. But having a house, it feels that homely place is a way of home-making and family-making. If we consider the idea of the house as something that represents a safe and secure identity, it also represents some kind of CONTAINER image schema, because at the end it is based on exclusion. The HOUSE metaphors unequivocally underline the difference between us and them, that is, those inside the house and those outside the house. Therefore, this can be seen as a CONTAINER schema (a subsidiary to UNITY schema), which, by the explanation of Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003: 29–30, 51), is an ontological metaphor in which some concept is represented as: having an inside and outside and are being capable of holding something else. As Chilton (1996: 183, in Billig, 1996: 210) points out, those inside the secure home are typically family, sharing blood relations, as opposed to outside, alien, and threatening beings, out of the unity, that have to be faced and challenged. The home provides stability and permanence or security, by holding things in place, but also does so “by means of exclusion rather than by any other means that are available to human societies” (Chilton, 1996: 183, in Billig, 1996: 210).
Container Domain > House Frame
Examples linked to this frame: