Chapter published in:

Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectives
Edited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-Lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 65–84

Chapter 3. Metaphor as a (de-)legitimizing strategy in leadership discourse

The language of crisis in Winston Churchill’s Cold War speeches

Jan Sebera

Wei-Lun Lu

This chapter investigates Churchill’s Cold War speeches as a case of how cognitive and corpus linguistics may serve as a useful tool for analyzing how political leaders legitimize their agendas via linguistic means. We find that Churchill’s rhetoric makes extensive use of the source domains person, journey, and building. The argumentative purpose is at least twofold. First, journey and building metaphors give positive value to the country’s prospects. Second, the journey metaphor is found to co-occur with personification, with the purpose of seeking partnership between the United States and the United Kingdom. We conclude by discussing how political leaders linguistically represent and conceptually frame a crisis, especially via metaphorical means, convincing their people of the usefulness of certain proposals and thus legitimizing their agendas, with Churchill as a representative example.

Keywords: crisis, leadership, Cold War, metaphor, Winston Churchill, legitimization

Published online: 08 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.04seb

References

Cameron, Lynne, and Graham Low

1999 Researching and Applying Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cap, Piotr

2006 Legitimization in Political Discourse. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Charteris-Black, Jonathan

2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. New York: Macmillan.

2005 Politicians and Rhetoric. New York: Macmillan.

Chilton, Paul Anthony

2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.

Churchill, Winston S.

1930 A Roving Commission: My Early Life. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Coulson, Seana

2008 “Framing and Blending in Persuasive Discourse.” In Frames, Corpora and Knowledge Representation, ed. by Rema Rossini Favretti, 33–42. Bologna: Bolonia University Press.

Coulson, Seana, and Esther Pascual

2006 “For the Sake of Argument: Mourning the Unborn and Reviving the Dead through Conceptual Blending.” Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 4: 153–181.

Crespo-Fernández, Eliecer

2013 “Words as Weapons for Mass Persuasion.” Text & Talk 33 (3): 311–330.

Edelman, Murray

1977 Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policie That Fail. New York: Academic Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner

2002 The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books.

Fillmore, Charles

1982 “Frame semantics.” In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, ed. by , 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing.

Geis, Michael L.

1987 The Language of Politics. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Goatly, Andrew

1997 The Language of Metaphors. New York: Routledge.

Hart, Christopher

2014 Discourse, Grammar and Ideology. London: Bloomsbury.

Johnson, Mark

1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Jowett, Garth, and Victoria O'Donnel

1992 Propaganda and Persuasion. London and Newbury Park: Sage.

Kilgarriff, Adam, Pavel Rychlý, Pavel Smrž, and David Tugwell

2004 “The Sketch Engine.” In Proceedings of the Eleventh EURALEX International Congress, ed. by Geoffrey Williams, and Sandra Vessier, 105–116. Lorient, France: Universite de Bretagne-Sud.

Kövecses, Zoltan

2002 Metaphor: A practical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, George

1993 “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony, 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2004 Don't Think of an Elephant. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing.

2008 The Political Mind. New York: Penguin.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson

1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner

1989 More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. London: University of Chicago Press.

Lu, L.Wei-lun

2008 “From Textual Prompts to Cognitive Models: A Context-oriented Perspective on Metaphor Interpretation in Taiwanese Presidential Speeches.” Language and Linguistics 9 (2): 341–358.

Lu, L.Wei-lun, and Kathleen Ahrens

2008 “Ideological Influence on BUILDING Metaphors in Taiwanese Presidential Speeches.” Discourse & Society 19 (3): 383–408.

Lu, Wei-lun

2017 “Religion and Worldview in Metaphor Use: Cultural Conceptualisations of Death in Taiwanese Buddhist and Christian Eulogistic Idioms.” In Advances in Cultural Linguistics ed. by Farzad Sharifian, 49–64. New York: Springer.

Macmillan Dictionary

2009–2015

Pelclová, Jana

2010 Persuasive Strategies in Advertising Discourse. A Lexico-grammatical and Socio-pragmatic Analysis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Brno: Masaryk University.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman

1981 “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211 (4481): 453–458.

van Dijk, Teun

1995 “Discourse Analysis as Ideology Analysis.” In Language and Peace, ed. by Christina Shaffner, and Anita L. Wendon, 17–33. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing.

van Leeuwen, Theo, and Ruth Wodak

1999 “Legitimizing Immigration Control:A Discourse-historical Analysis.” Discourse Studies 10 (1): 83–118.

Corpus and database consulted

Selected Speeches of Winston Churchill 2011 http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill.

The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition) 2007 Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.