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: 01 May 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.19016.zen
References

References

Adams, K. L.
(2009) Conceptual metaphors of family in political debates in the USA. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender, and conceptual metaphors (pp. 184–206). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ahrens, K.
(Ed.) (2009) Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2019) First Lady, Secretary of State and Presidential Candidate: A comparative study of the role-dependant use of metaphor in politics. In P. Julien, M. Reuchamps, & P. Thibodeau (Eds.), Variation in political metaphor (pp. 13–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ahrens, K., & Lee, S.
(2009) Gender versus politics: When conceptual models collide in the U.S. Senate. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender, and conceptual metaphor (pp. 62–82). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ahrens, K., & Zeng, H.
(2017) Conceptualizing EDUCATION in Hong Kong and China. In R. E. Roxas. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31) (pp. 303–311). Cebu, Philippines: University of the Philippines. Retrieved from http://​www​.aclweb​.org​/anthology​/Y17​-1041
Atkeson, L. R.
(2003) Not all cues are created equal: The conditional impact of female candidates on political engagement. The Journal of Politics, 65(4), 1040–1061. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baxter, J.
(2010) The language of female leadership. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Burgers, C., & Ahrens, K.
In press). Change in metaphorical framing over time: Metaphors of trade in 225 years of State of the Union addresses (1790–2014). Applied Linguistics.
Cameron, D.
(2006/2012) On language and sexual politics. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, J.
(2005) Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2006) Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse & Society, 17(5), 563–581. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2009) Metaphor and gender in British parliamentary debates. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors (pp. 139–165). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2013) Analysing political speeches: Rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Chung, S. F., Ahrens, K., & Huang, C. R.
(2004) Using WordNet and SUMO to determine source domains of conceptual metaphors. In D. H. Ji, L. K. Teng, & H. Wang (Eds.), Recent Advancement in Chinese Lexical Semantics: Proceedings of 5th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW-5) (pp. 91–98). Singapore: COLIPS. Retrieved from http://​cwn​.ling​.sinica​.edu​.tw​/churen​/CLSW​_Chung​_final1​.pdf
Coates, J.
(1987) Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of sex differences in language. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Dodson, D. L.
(2006) The impact of women in congress. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fellbaum, C.
(2005) WordNet and wordnets. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.) (pp. 665–670). Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Flannery, M. C.
(2001) Quilting: A feminist metaphor for scientific inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 628–645. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Field, A.
(2013) Discovering statistics using SPSS (4th ed.). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Gertzog, I. N.
(1995) Congressional women: Their recruitment, integration, and behaviour (2nd ed.). New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Gilbert, N.
(1993) Analyzing tabular data: Loglinear and logistic models for social researchers. London: UCL Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, J.
(1995) Women, men and politeness. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Holmes, J., & Meyerhoff, M.
(Eds.) (2003) The handbook of language and gender (Vol. 251). Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, O.
(1922) Language, its nature, origin and development. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Jones, J. J.
(2016) Talk “Like a Man”: The linguistic styles of Hillary Clinton, 1992–2013. Perspectives on Politics, 14(3), 625–642. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Karpowitz, C. F., & Mendelberg, T.
(2014) The silent sex: Gender, deliberation, and institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Koller, V.
(2004a) Businesswomen and war metaphors: ‘possessive, jealous and pugnacious’? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(1), 3–22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2004b) Metaphor and gender in business media discourse: A critical cognitive study. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, G.
(1993) The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed.) (pp. 202–250). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1996/2002) Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M.
(1980/2003) Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G.
(1977) The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometric, 33(1), 159–174. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lim, E. T.
(2009) Gendered metaphors of women in power: The case of Hillary Clinton as madonna, unruly woman, bitch and witch. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors (pp. 254–269). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Musolff, A.
(2004) Metaphor and political discourse: Analogical reasoning in debates about Europe. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016) Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Niles, I., & Pease, A.
(2001) Towards a standard upper ontology. In C. Welty, & B. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2001) (pp. 2–9). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Philip, G.
(2009) Non una donna in politica, ma una donna politica: Women’s political language in an Italian context. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors (pp. 83–111). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Semino, E., & Koller, V.
(2009) Metaphor, politics and gender: A case study from Italy. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors (pp. 36–61). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Steen, G. J., Reijnierse, W. G., & Burgers, C.
(2014) When do natural language metaphors influence reasoning? A follow-up study to Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2013). PloS ONE, 9(12), e113536. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T.
(2010) A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, A., & Goschler, J.
(2009) Sex differences in the usage of spatial metaphors: A case study of political language. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors (pp. 166–183). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S.
(2007) Using multivariate statistics. New York: Allyn & Bacon/Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Talbot, M.
(2003) Gender stereotypes: Reproduction and challenge. In J. Holmes & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), The handbook of language and gender (pp. 468–486). Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tay, D.
(2015) Metaphor in case study articles on Chinese university counseling service websites. Chinese Language and Discourse, 6(1), 28–56. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2017) Quantitative metaphor usage patterns in Chinese psychotherapy talk. Communication & Medicine, 14(1), 51–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tenorio, E. H.
(2009) The metaphorical construction of Ireland. In K. Ahrens (Ed.), Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors (pp. 112–136). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L.
(2011) Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS ONE, 6(2), e16782. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2013) Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning. PloS ONE, 8(1), e52961. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Van Dijk, T. A.
(1997) What is political discourse analysis? In J. Blommaert & C. Bulcaen (Eds.), Political linguistics (pp. 11–52). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
(2002) Political discourse and political cognition. In P. Chilton & C. Schäffner (Eds.), Politics as text and talk: Analytic approaches to political discourse (pp. 203–237). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Velasco-Sacristán, M. S.
(2005) A critical cognitive-pragmatic approach to advertising gender metaphors. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2(3), 219–252. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, F.
(1992) Language, technology, gender, and power. Human Relations, 45(9), 883–904. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wimmer, R. D., & Dominick, J. R.
(2013) Mass media research: An introduction (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Yang, J.
(2013) The politics of huanghua: Gender, metaphors, and privatization in China. Language & Communication, 33(1), 61–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Lancaster, Mason D.
2021. Metaphor Research and the Hebrew Bible. Currents in Biblical Research 19:3 ► pp. 235 ff. Crossref logo
Sun, Ya, Gongyuan Wang & Hui Ren
2021. To Entertain or to Serve: Chinese and US Banks’ Online Identity Based on a Genre Analysis of Social Media. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 64:2 ► pp. 121 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.