Kommunikative Strategien des Goethe-Instituts auf Social Media: Beweggründe, Metaphern und institutionelle Unterschiede zwischen den Standorten Tokyo und Brüssel auf Facebook und LinkedIn

Details

Supervisors

Suner Munoz, Ferran

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue, à finalité spécialisée: langues des affaires

Abstract

enThis master’s thesis examines the communicative strategies used by the Goethe-Institute to promote its language and culture offerings on the social media platforms Facebook and LinkedIn, and the verbal, visual, and multimodal metaphorical devices employed in doing so. The study focuses on a comparison between the Tokyo and Brussels locations, investigating whether and how cultural differences are reflected in the metaphorical conceptualization of institutional communication. Based on a corpus of 155 social media posts, a quantitative-qualitative content analysis is conducted using a custom-developed coding scheme, theoretically grounded in conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2003), and multimodal metaphor theory (Forceville, 2006), combined with approaches to institutional communication. The results show that the two institutes differ significantly across nearly all examined categories, particularly in verbal metaphor, while no institute-specific association can be found for visual and multimodal metaphor. Tokyo favors low-threshold, functional-institutional image fields such as path, bridge, and network, whereas Brussels draws on more complex, physically and politically charged metaphors closely tied to the promoted artistic content. The discussion of these findings suggest that this difference cannot primarily be attributed to culturally rooted “metaphor repertoires” in a narrow sense, but rather to the differing institutional embedding, target audience structure, and thematic orientation of the two locations. The thesis thus contributes an empirically grounded perspective to research on multimodal metaphor in institutional communication, while also highlighting the limits of a purely culture-comparative explanation of institutional communication differences.