Metaphor as a Persuasive Device in Professional Discourse : A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of Winton Churchill’s Rhetoric
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This study investigates how metaphor plays a persuasive role in politician's rhetoric as a central type of professional discourse. We critically analyze Winston Churchill's rhetoric during the Cold War period, which did not earn much scholarly attention. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining approaches from corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In our study, politicians’ rhetoric is understood as a means of persuasion in professional discourse given its ability to shape the mind state of their audience, of which metaphor is a critical part. The metaphors we found are sorted in three most frequent categories: LIGHT/DARKNESS metaphors portray individual ideologies in (un)favourable light. Metaphors of LIGHT were used as highly positive evaluation of democratic countries exploiting the generally good connotations of light in Christian civilization. Metaphors of DARKNESS are used as the polar opposite to metaphors of LIGHT, portraying communist regimes as the antagonist of the 'righteous' democratic countries and greatest danger for the values of the Christian civilization. The polarity between these two metaphors aims to support Churchill's goal of uniting the democracies against what he marks as common enemy of all democratic regimes that might attempt to start a new world war. JOURNEY metaphors are used for marking politics and life as a process that has to be undertaken in order to achieve the common goal of all nations – securing and maintaining peace in the world in the aftermath of the Second World War, as well as for marking the states as travelling companions sharing their goals and travelling in the same way. BUILDING metaphors portray the United Nations organization as an instrument of peace and the difficult work in the process of its establishing that must be done in order to achieve the mutual goal of maintaining the peace by uniting in the United Nations. It is our hope to demonstrate how different sorts of metaphor work in collaboration to create a persuasive effect in professional discourse, with politician’s language as a typical example. |
| Related projects: |