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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 19:2 (2020) ► pp.201–225

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Metaphors in political communication

A case study of the use of deliberate metaphors in non-institutional political interviews

ORCiD logo with link | Université de Liège
 | Catholic University of Louvain
 | Université de Namur
 | Université de Liège
 | Catholic University of Louvain
Published online: 19 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17057.hey
Abstract
This article analyses the use of (deliberate) metaphors in political discourse produced by French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians during non-institutional political interviews. The article first investigates if the use of deliberate metaphor limits itself to a particular type of political discourse (i.e. public and institutional political discourse) or if metaphor use is also found in other types of settings (i.e. non-institutional political discourse). Second, the article analyses the variation of deliberate metaphor use between political actors depending on gender, seniority and political affiliation. To this end, the article applies Steen’s (Steen, Gerard J. 2008. ‘The Paradox of Metaphor: Why We Need a Three-dimensional Model for Metaphor.’ Metaphor & Symbol 231:213–241. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis on biographical interviews conducted with French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians (RMPs). Our results indicate that RMPs, when using non-deliberate metaphors, mostly rely on source domains such as construction, battle and relationships. This is in contrast with the use of deliberate metaphors, where source domains like sports, nature and container take the upper hand.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Deliberate metaphors in political discourse
  • 3.Data & method
    • 3.1Corpus: Face-to-face narrative interviews with political representatives
    • 3.2Metaphor identification
    • 3.3Identifying deliberate metaphors
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The use of deliberate metaphor by Belgian regional MPs
    • 4.2Deliberate versus non-deliberate metaphor: Source domain saliency
    • 4.3Variation in deliberate metaphor use
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion and further work
  • Notes
  • References
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