Persuading population through metaphors: a cognitive linguistic analysis of Obama’s and Trump’s inaugural addresses

Abstract

As Lakoff & Johnson claim in their book Metaphors We Live By (1980: 3), “metaphor is typically viewed as a characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought and action”. From this affirmation, some people think that metaphor is only used deliberately and that is why these authors postulated, according to the Cognitive Linguistic view, that “our conceptual system plays a central role in defining our everyday realities”. Furthermore, they define metaphor as a tool which allows us to understand one conceptual domain in terms of another, e.g. ARGUMENTS in terms of WAR, as reflected in everyday expressions such as “Your claims are indefensible.”, “He attacked every weak point in my argument”, “His criticism were right on a target”, and so on. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present an analysis of metaphors in political speeches, more specifically, in inaugural addresses. For so doing, I selected the inaugural speeches of two presidents of the United States of America, namely Barack Obama and his successor, the current president, Donald Trump. In each of those addresses the most relevant metaphorical expressions were identified, together with their underlying conceptual metaphors. It must also be mentioned that although the analysis is mainly focused on the conceptual metaphors that motivate the metaphorical expressions, some metonimies will be addressed as well, due to the fact that these conceptual phenomena tend to be interrelated. All in all, the results of this study reinforce the idea that linguistic metaphors are a powerful tool that offer a window into how two different people can construe reality in their conceptual systems in a different way.