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Part of
Variation in Political Metaphor
Edited by Julien Perrez, Min Reuchamps and Paul H. Thibodeau
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 85] 2019
► pp. 13–34

Chapter 1
First Lady, Secretary of State and Presidential Candidate

A comparative study of the role-dependent use of metaphor in politics

While many studies have examined to what extent politicians invoked a particular source domain to advance their ideology, no study to date has focused on the metaphor use of an individual politician across different political roles. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the war metaphors used by Hillary Clinton in her personal speeches in the roles of U.S. First Lady, a U.S. Senator, and as a candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination for U.S. President and demonstrates that Clinton’s metaphor use reflects a politician who chooses her battles carefully and invokes figurative language to gain support for the causes that are important to her.

Keywords: Conceptual Metaphor Theory, war metaphors, Hillary Clinton, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Metaphor Analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Politics, gender and metaphor
  • 3.Historical background on Clinton’s political roles
  • 4.Political corpora
  • 5.Methods
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Time
    • 6.2Conceptual metaphor type
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.85.01ahr
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