Metaphorical evaluation: a study of evaluation as expressed by conceptual metaphors in the political speeches of two north american presidents

Abstract

The relations holding between politics and cognitive science have to do with the cognitive unconscious level: much of what we interpret from political discourse does not lie in the linguistic expressions being used but in the interpretation that is activated and configured in our minds by such expressions. According to van Dijk (2002) and Lakoff (2009), the domain of political discourse and cognition has not received enough attention so far. Taking this into account, the main motivation of the present research was to attempt to determine discoursal interconnections holding between the operation of conceptual metaphors by means of the examination of the paradigmatic sets of linguistic expressions which formalise them at text level, and the expressions of evaluative meanings according to the proposals by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the former, and Martin and White (2005), the latter. Focusing on political discourse, the corpus chosen consisted of public political speeches given by the latest two presidents of the United States, namely, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It is proposed the existence of linguistic differences in opposing politicians’ public speeches when they express their ideological positions by means of joint expressions of Conceptual Metaphors and Appraisal Items, this difference being in correlation with Lakoff (2009)’s proposal of metaphorical systems of moral values. In addition, it is also proposed the existence of a metaphorical evaluative discourse modelled by the participants in discourses such as the ones presented in this study.