Article published in:
Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction: Multimodal and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Manuela Romano and Maria Dolores Porto
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 262] 2016
► pp. 215–244

The use of metaphor and evaluation as discourse strategies in pre-electoral debates

Just about winning votes

| University of Alcalá
The present chapter analyzes metaphor use in a Spanish pre-electoral debate and its interplay with evaluation. The metaphorical expressions found are cross-­culturally contrasted with those from a previous study for English (Neagu 2013) to verify to what extent they are equivalent in English and Spanish and whether similarities are influenced by ideological factors. Furthermore, the evaluative overload of metaphors in the Spanish debate is explored by confronting them with the evaluative devices encountered in the same text after the application of Hunston’s (2000) evaluation model and Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory. Results show that, although cross-cultural expression of metaphors differs at times, all politicians use them to win election, rather than due to ideological reasons. Moreover, metaphor and evaluation are often realized by the same linguistic expressions.
Keywords: Appraisal Theory, argumentative strategies, Critical Discourse Analysis, cross-cultural, evaluation, metaphor, persuasion, political discourse, pre-electoral debate
Published online: 31 March 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.262.09die
References
Barcelona Sánchez, Antonio
2001 “On the Systematic Contrastive Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors: Case Studies and Proposed Methodology.” In Applied Cognitive Linguistics II: Language Pedagogy (Vol. 29), ed. by Martin Pütz, Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven, 117–146. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C
1987 Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cabrejas-Peñuelas, Ana B
2015. “Manipulation in Spanish and American Pre-electoral Debates: The Rajoy-Rubalcaba vs the Obama-MacCain Debates”. Intercultural Pragmatics 13(4).
Cabrejas-Peñuelas, Ana B. and Díez-Prados, Mercedes
2014 “Positive Self-evaluation versus Negative Other-evaluation in the Political Genre or Pre-election Debates”. Discourse & Society 25 (2): 159–185. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Caño, Antonio
2011 “Debates: Made in USA”. El País.com 7 November 2011, http://​blogs​.elpais​.com​/ala​-oeste​/2011​/11​/debates​-made​-in​-usa​.html(accessed 3 October 2015).Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2005 Politicians and Rhetoric. The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006 “Britain as a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign.” Discourse & Society 17 (5): 563–581. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Timothy Ennis
2001 “A Comparative Study of Metaphor in Spanish and English Financial Reporting.” English for Specific Purposes 20: 249–266. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul
2011 “Still Something Missing in CDA.” Discourse Studies 13 (6): 769–781. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cienki, Alan
April 2005 “Researching Conceptual Metaphors that (may) Underlie Political Discourse.” ECPR Workshop on Metaphor in Political Science , Grenada, Spain: 1–18, http:/​/ecpr​.eu​/Filestore​/PaperProposal​/60476c8f​-960f​-40d2​-9194​-c342a40cf7c6​.pdf (accessed 3 October 2015).
Díez-Prados, Mercedes and Ana B. Cabrejas-Peñuelas
In preparation. “Evaluation in Spanish and American Pre-election Political Debates.” Manuscript.
Fairclough, Norman
2001 “Critical Discourse Analysis as a Method in Social Scientific Discourse.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 121–138. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Goatly, Andrew
2007 Washing the Brain. Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hart, Christopher
2007 “Critical Discourse Analysis and metaphor: Toward a theoretical framework.” Critical Discourse Studies 5 (2): 91–106. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan
2000 “Evaluation and the Planes of Discourse: Status and Value in Persuasive Texts.” In Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, ed. by Susan Hunston, and Geoff Thompson, 176–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Clella I
2013 Public Speaking. Concepts & Skills for a Diverse Society. 7th ed. (International Edition). Canada: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltan
2002 Metaphor. A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2005 Metaphor in Culture. Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George
1992 “Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf.” In Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution ed. by Martin Pütz, 463–481. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1996 Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals don’t. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2002 Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors we Live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Minds and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Turner
1989 More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
López Rodríguez, Irene
2007 “The Representation of Women in Teenage and Women’s Magazines: Recurring Metaphors in English.” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 15: 15–42.Google Scholar
Martin, James R. and Peter R.R. White
2005 The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas
2004 Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 “The Study of Metaphor as Part of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (3): 301–310. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Neagu, Maria-Ionela
2013 Decoding Political Discourse: Conceptual Metaphors and Argumentation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rojo López, Ana M. and Mª Ángeles Orts Llopis
2008 “Conceptual Metaphors and Translation: A Comparative Study of Metaphors in English and Spanish Financial Reports.” In Researching and Teaching Specialized Languages: New Contexts, New Challenges, ed. by Purificación Sánchez Hernández, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Pilar Aguado Jiménez and Raquel Criado Sánchez, 424–434. Murcia: Editum.Google Scholar
Semino, Elena
2008 Metaphors in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Semino, Elena and Michela Masci
1996 “Politics is Football: Metaphor in the Discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy.” Discourse & Society 7 (2): 243–269. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
“
Socialist Election Victory near Impossible, Says Latest Poll”. El País in English, 4 November 2011, http://​elpais​.com​/elpais​/2011​/11​/04​/inenglish​/1320387650​_850210​.html (accessed 3 October 2015).Google Scholar
Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jörg Schmid
1996 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A
2005 “War Rhetoric of a Little Ally: Political Implicatures and Aznar’s Legitimatization of the War in Iraq.” Journal of Language and Politics 4 (1): 65–91. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Díez Prados, Mercedes
2019.  In Engagement in Professional Genres [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 301], ► pp. 217 ff. Crossref logo
Díez-Prados, Mercedes & Ana Belén Cabrejas-Peñuelas
2020. Construction and negotiation of voter-friendly identities in electoral debates. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 82 ► pp. 93 ff. Crossref logo
García-Gómez, Antonio
2018. Dragons’ Den : Enacting persuasion in reality television. Discourse, Context & Media 21 ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 may 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.