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Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 10:1 (2020) ► pp.141–168

A multifactorial analysis of metaphors in political discourse

Gendered influence in Hong Kong political speeches

| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

The rising prominence of women in politics has sparked a growing interest in comparing the language of male and female politicians. Many researchers have explored whether gender in politics has had an impact on their metaphor styles. While these studies have been oriented qualitatively and have concentrated on the two-way interaction between metaphor and gender, the possibility that metaphor and gender may interact with other additional factors is largely overlooked. This article adopts a quantitatively oriented approach complemented with textual analysis to explore potential multiple-way interactions between ‘metaphor’, ‘gender’, ‘speech section’ and ‘political role’ in political discourse. By conducting a case study of metaphor use in Hong Kong political speeches, we found evidence of gendered metaphors and their variability according to politicians’ political roles and different rhetorical sections in their speeches.

Keywords: political discourse, metaphor, gender, multifactorial analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gendered metaphor and political discourse
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus creation
    • 3.2Metaphor identification
    • 3.3Variables
      • 3.3.1 source domain
      • 3.3.2 speech section
    • 3.4Inter-coder reliability
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1 source domain * gender
    • 4.2 source domain * gender * speech section
      • source domain and gender across the speech section of prologue
      • source domain and gender across the speech section of narrative
      • source domain and gender across the speech section of proof
      • source domain and gender across the speech section of epilogue
    • 4.3 source domain * gender * political role
      • source domain and gender across the political role of CSA
      • source domain and gender across the political role of SJ
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.19016.zen
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