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.
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.
Ahrens, K. (Ed.). (2009). Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.
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.
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 [URL]
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.
Baxter, J. (2010). The language of female leadership. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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.
Charteris-Black, J. (2005). Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.
Charteris-Black, J. (2006). Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse & Society, 17(5), 563–581.
Charteris-Black, J. (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.
Charteris-Black, J. (2013). Analysing political speeches: Rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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 [URL]
Coates, J. (1987). Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of sex differences in language. New York: Longman.
Dodson, D. L. (2006). The impact of women in congress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fellbaum, C. (2005). WordNet and wordnets. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.) (pp. 665–670). Oxford: Elsevier.
Flannery, M. C. (2001). Quilting: A feminist metaphor for scientific inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(5), 628–645.
Field, A. (2013). Discovering statistics using SPSS (4th ed.). London: Sage.
Gertzog, I. N. (1995). Congressional women: Their recruitment, integration, and behaviour (2nd ed.). New York: Praeger.
Gilbert, N. (1993). Analyzing tabular data: Loglinear and logistic models for social researchers. London: UCL Press.
Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men and politeness. London and New York: Longman.
Holmes, J., & Meyerhoff, M. (Eds.). (2003). The handbook of language and gender (Vol. 251). Oxford: Blackwell.
Jespersen, O. (1922). Language, its nature, origin and development. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Jones, J. J. (2016). Talk “Like a Man”: The linguistic styles of Hillary Clinton, 1992–2013. Perspectives on Politics, 14(3), 625–642.
Karpowitz, C. F., & Mendelberg, T. (2014). The silent sex: Gender, deliberation, and institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Koller, V. (2004a). Businesswomen and war metaphors: ‘possessive, jealous and pugnacious’?Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(1), 3–22.
Koller, V. (2004b). Metaphor and gender in business media discourse: A critical cognitive study. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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.
Lakoff, G. (1996/2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980/2003). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometric, 33(1), 159–174.
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.
Musolff, A. (2004). Metaphor and political discourse: Analogical reasoning in debates about Europe. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Musolff, A. (2016). Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2007). Using multivariate statistics. New York: Allyn & Bacon/Pearson Education.
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.
Tay, D. (2017). Quantitative metaphor usage patterns in Chinese psychotherapy talk. Communication & Medicine, 14(1), 51–68.
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.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS ONE, 6(2), e16782.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning. PloS ONE, 8(1), e52961.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). What is political discourse analysis? In J. Blommaert & C. Bulcaen (Eds.), Political linguistics (pp. 11–52). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Van Dijk, T. A. (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.
Velasco-Sacristán, M. S. (2005). A critical cognitive-pragmatic approach to advertising gender metaphors. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2(3), 219–252.
Wilson, F. (1992). Language, technology, gender, and power. Human Relations, 45(9), 883–904.
Wimmer, R. D., & Dominick, J. R. (2013). Mass media research: An introduction (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Yang, J. (2013). The politics of huanghua: Gender, metaphors, and privatization in China. Language & Communication, 33(1), 61–68.
Cited by (16)
Cited by 16 other publications
Ahrens, Kathleen, Winnie Huiheng Zeng, Christian Burgers & Chu-Ren Huang
2024. Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?. Linguistics Vanguard
Chen, Joanna Zhuoan, Kathleen Ahrens & Dennis Tay
2024. ‘Luxurious’ metaphors in luxury hotel websites in Singapore and Hong Kong: A mixed-methods study. Applied Corpus Linguistics 4:2 ► pp. 100090 ff.
Garlepow, Linnea, Nina Funke & Barbara Ann Güldenring
2024. A multifactorial approach to war and corruption metaphors in South Asian Englishes. World Englishes
Peng, Wei & Qingping Li
2024. Metaphorical discourse in Beijing Winter Olympic news: a Trinocular Perspective analysis of language, cognition, and social functions. Frontiers in Psychology 15
2023. Exploring color metaphor with Behavioral Profiles: A usage-based analysis on the metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color term bái “white”. Lingua 289 ► pp. 103539 ff.
Sun, Ya, Deyi Kong & Chenmeng Zhou
2023. Economy or ecology: metaphor use over time in China’s Government Work Reports. Language and Cognition 15:3 ► pp. 551 ff.
Zeng, Winnie Huiheng & Kathleen Ahrens
2023. Corpus-Based Metaphorical Framing Analysis: WAR Metaphors in Hong Kong Public Discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 38:3 ► pp. 254 ff.
2022. Exploring the technicality of LIQUID metaphorical chunks in business discourse. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 57 ► pp. 101113 ff.
Sun, Ya, Yang Hu, Dicong Gou & Qiong Wang
2022. To orient and to engage: Metaphorical hashtags in Weibo posts of Chinese banks. Journal of Pragmatics 194 ► pp. 87 ff.
Tay, Dennis
2022. Navigating the Realities of Metaphor and Psychotherapy Research,
Lancaster, Mason D.
2021. Metaphor Research and the Hebrew Bible. Currents in Biblical Research 19:3 ► pp. 235 ff.
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.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 december 2024. 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.