Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2015

This paper considers the Party Conference Speech as a paradigmatic example of effective political discourse, so as to identify and analyse the elements that make for the successful reception of a speech, and determine the ways in which the leader brings about consensus and generates applause. Methodologically speaking, our framework for analysis combines (i) quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as (ii) textual and multimodal analyses of the performed text. We start with a quantitative overview of party conference speeches analysed as written corpora, before zooming in on Tony Blair’s 2006 party conference speech, in which we identify what non-verbal strategies come into play in the discursive construction of the leader’s individual and the party’s collective identities.

This article examines the logic and power of financial news metaphors in the current economic climate. The sequence of global financial crises starting in late 2007 led to a particular discursive phenomenon in financial news. Newspapers constructed, with vivid imagery (e.g., toxic loans, nervous markets to be calmed down), a globalized register for talking and writing about the crises. The empirical study of 3,730 Dutch and Flemish-Belgian financial news articles (2,042,596 words) investigates how during 2006–2013 metaphor power (De Landtsheer, 2009) interacts with financial-economic indicators. It is suggested, on the basis of the case study, that financial news articles generally may be more metaphorical during crises; metaphor power significantly correlates with Eurostat financial-economic indicators in either a positive direction (unemployment rates, public debt) or a negative one (gross national product, consumer confidence).

As metaphors not only reflect perceived reality, but can also function as cues through which citizens come to understand complex political processes, the aim of this study is to look at how specific metaphors might impact on the citizens’ framing of Belgian federalism. To measure the impact of metaphors on political representations, we conducted an experiment among 493 citizens based on an article published in the newspaper “Le Soir”, in which Belgian federalism was compared to a Tetris game in both a text and an image. The participants were distributed across four experimental conditions according to the type of input they had been exposed to (text and image, text only, image only, no input) and were asked to perform a free description task. The productions of the participants were analyzed using keyword and content analyses. The results suggest that the participants who had been exposed to the experimental text tended to frame their perception of Belgian federalism in different ways. They also show that reading the text had more of an impact on the representations than looking at the image, but that this impact was in both cases short-lived.

Based on the assumption that extended metaphor may constitute a case of deliberate metaphor and therefore has the potential to influence people’s opinions, this paper investigates whether extending a metaphorical frame in a text leads people to perceive policy measures that are in line with that frame as more effective for solving a crime problem than other policy measures. The metaphorical frames ‘Crime is a virus’ and ‘Crime is a beast’ were extended in one experiment each via a series of additional conventional metaphorical expressions having crime as the target domain and beasts/viruses as the source domain. Participants (N = 354, Experiment 1; N = 361, Experiment 2) were randomly assigned to one of five experimental conditions with increasing numbers of sentences containing metaphorical expressions, and rated the effectiveness of a set of policy measures to solve the crime problem described in the text. The data yield limited support for our hypothesis. When controlling for political affiliation, the ratings for frame-consistent measures trended in the hypothesised direction in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 yielded a trend for frame-inconsistent measures. These results suggest that metaphorical framing effects may be more subtle than has been assumed.

When people talk about politics, they often employ metaphors, sometimes in extended sequences, in which a metaphorical idea is referred to across a larger segment of discourse (e.g., talk about political debates as wars, boxing matches, or games of chess). Empirical studies from psychology indicate that, at least in some cases, metaphors can have great persuasive value. My primary claim in this article is that many political metaphors in discourse are often understood as instances of allegory. Allegories refer to extended metaphors in which an entire narrative introduces and elaborates upon a metaphorical source domain to present a rich symbolic understanding of people and events. I describe several notable instances of political allegory and go on to suggest that people can readily interpret many of these allegories via ‘embodied simulations’ by which they imagine themselves participating in the very actions referred to in the language. These embodied simulations are automatic and sometimes tap into enduring allegorical themes that have symbolic value within different cultural communities.