The source domain of WAR is often used in conceptual metaphors in political rhetoric (i.e., CAMPAIGN IS A BATTLE), with researchers looking at how politicians use this concrete conceptual domain to advance their partisan views. To undertake this work, they have often focused on analyzing metaphor use within corpora of a particular speaker or genre.

 

Charteris-Black (2005), in an example of speaker-based corpora analysis, noted that former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used WAR metaphors to confront and vilify her political opponents. Musolff (2016), in an example of genre-based analysis, looked at metaphors in UK broadsheets to understand how the same metaphor developed differently in various discourses within a culture over time. What has not yet been examined, however, is a combination of the two: whether one politician speaking different political roles (and thus, in different genres) would modulate his/her metaphor use. One hypothesis, based on Musolff’s (2016) scenario-based analysis of metaphors, suggests that different political roles constitute different discourses and entail different metaphor use. An alternate hypothesis suggests that there is an underlying mapping principle between the source-target domain pairing in a conceptual metaphor and this underlying mapping principle would take precedence (Ahrens 2010).

 

We examine this question by creating three corpora for Hillary Clinton from a fifteen-year period encompassing her roles as First Lady (1993-2000), Senator (2001-2007), and candidate for the Democratic party presidential nomination (2007-2008). We then extracted all the lemmas for eleven keywords identified as having an ontological relationship with the source domain of WAR (protect, defend, attack, combat, struggle, battle, fight, war, threat, destroy and defeat) and identified the metaphors within the extracted examples based on the MIPVU criteria (Steen et al. 2010).

 

three corpora, Clinton uses the WAR metaphor primarily in the role of ‘protector’ and invokes them most frequently as Senator followed by We find that over allpresidential candidate. In addition, her use of individual conceptual metaphors in the source domain of WAR (i.e., PROTECTING X IS A BATTLE, ENSURING X IS A BATTLE) varies according to her role. In short, the study provides evidence for mapping principles behaving consistently within narrowly defined source-target domain pairings (Ahrens 2010), as well as evidence that Clinton preferred certain pairings in different roles (Musolff 2016). The paper concludes by suggesting a way to integrate the two approaches when analyzing metaphor use in political rhetoric.

 

 

References

Ahrens, K. (2010). Mapping principles for conceptual metaphors. In G. Low, A. Deignan, L. Cameron & Z. Todd (Eds.). Researching and applying metaphor in the real world (Vol. 26) (pp. 185-208). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

 

Charteris-Black, J. (2005). Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. London: Macmillian.

 

Musolff, A. (2016). Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London, and New York: Bloomsbury.

 

Steen, G., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU (Vol. 14). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.