Political Discourse Analysis: A Comparative Analysis on The Use of Metaphors In Political Discourse

Abstract

This study proposes a twofold analysis: first, it proposes to follow the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP, Pragglejaz Group, 2007) to identify and determine the ubiquity and functionality of metaphors related to immigration in the political discourses of Donald Trump, James Cameron, and Santiago Abascal. Second, it proposes to apply Steen’s (2008) three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis in communication to the results obtained from the MIP analysis. The corpus has been analyzed making a distinction between three levels of metaphor, at the linguistic level, metaphors were marked as direct or indirect; at the conceptual level, metaphors were marked as novel or conventional; and at the communicative level, metaphors were distinguished as deliberate or non-deliberate. Results suggest that metaphors are a fundamental linguistic resource to politicians in order to explain abstract concepts. Furthermore, results suggest that politicians use different strategies, as the repeated use of source domains - Container, Personalization, Space and Danger- to consciously frame the political debate to achieve particular political goals.