THE USE OF METAPHORS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES: METAPHORS IN THE SPEECHES OF BARACK OBAMA AND DONALD J. TRUMP
THE USE OF METAPHORS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES: METAPHORS IN THE SPEECHES OF BARACK OBAMA AND DONALD J. TRUMP

Summary/Abstract: Politics is a struggle for power with the aim of putting political ideas into practice. When giving a speech, politicians want to attract the attention of the public by all available means. The language which they use aims to mobilize the constituents, to persuade the undecided and to attack political opponents. It is for this reason that figurative language and figures of speech appear rather frequently in political speeches. A metaphor as a linguistic tool can be manipulated both for pragmatic and strategic reasons. Metaphors encountered in political speeches facilitate human understanding of complex concepts by explaining them via bodily experiences and the physical senses. It is for that reason that they rhetorically contribute to mental representations of political issues. This study aims to explore how politicians tend to convey their messages and ideas through the use of different types of metaphors: ontological, structural, and orientational. In order to achieve this goal, I will analyze three speeches given by Barack Obama between 2008 and 2009, and three speeches given by Donald J. Trump between 2016 and 2018 while using the model of study proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980).

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