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Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 12:2 (2022) ► pp.245–269

Speakers who metaphorize together  – argue together

Interaction between metaphors and arguments as a dynamic discourse phenomenon

 | Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
 | Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
 | Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Numerous studies on political discourse claim that metaphors help politicians to construct coherent arguments to convince their voters. Yet, most of them, with a few notable exceptions, do not adhere to any theory of argumentation. In this paper, we integrate Discourse Dynamic Approach to Metaphor with Inference Anchoring Theory to enhance our understanding of the interaction of metaphors and arguments in dynamic discourse. Our data come from three pre-election debates: Two in Poland and one in the US. The focus is on the reform of the health service. We show how discourse participants co-construct metaphors and arguments in an attempt to achieve their illocutionary goals. Their interaction is curbed by a number of discursive forces identified in the data. We propose a classification of types of interaction between metaphors and arguments, which can be further used for developing tools for automatic or semi-automatic identification of these types in large corpora.
Keywords: discourse dynamic approach to metaphor, Inference Anchoring Theory, metaphor – argument interaction, collaborative metaphor, pre-election debate, political discourse, health service
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphor and argumentation as dynamic discourse phenomena
    • 2.1Discourse dynamic approach to metaphor analysis
    • 2.2Dialogical arguments in Inference Anchoring Theory
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Data and the socio-political and cultural context of the study
    • 3.2Methods
  • 4.Dynamic interaction of metaphors and arguments in pre-election debates
    • 4.1The Polish TVP Debate
    • 4.2The Polish TVN Debate
    • 4.3The U.S. 2016 debate
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 22 April 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.21016.jus
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