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Abstract
This paper explores the roles of the cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphor and performativity in political policy by conducting a case study on the South Korean government’s Sunshine Policy toward North Korea from 1998 to 2008. This study contends that the policy is metaphorically motivated by an Aesop’s fable, The sun and the wind, a narrative whose entailments have significant implications for the policy. It also systematically accounts for the policy’s performative characteristic, focusing on the fact that the policy makers intended to map the causal relationship of the narrative onto a real-world relationship, even though the real-world causal relationship must be based on the unknown result of the policy. Lastly, this paper discusses theoretical implications of the performativity entangled with the conceptual metaphors in the policy; the real-world concept is usually what limits the mapping possibilities, but in this case, the narrative structure of the fable determines the construal.