Decoding Political Discourse

Conceptual Metaphors and Argumentation

Maria-Ionela Neagu

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349456482, 9781137309891
• eBook ISBN: 9781137309907
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides an in-depth look into the cognitive and argumentative nature of political discourse with a focus on the role and place of conceptual metaphors in practical argumentation. Neagu's empirical investigation centres on the corpus of the American Presidential debates in 2008 and speeches by Barack Obama from 2009-2011.

1

Introduction

Abstract: Chapter 1 summarizes the main claims that the author makes throughout the book. Here are some of them: 1. political discourse is deliberative and argumentative in nature, therefore the role of metaphorical reasoning must be to reframe a situation in order to steer the argument towards a particular conclusion and course of action; 2. political discourse seeks to bridge a mental void engendered by people’s needs and frustrations; 3. conceptual metaphors as arguments to or from classifications and definitions should be critically questioned and challenged; 4. conceptual metaphors can be embedded in the ‘circumstantial, goal, value premises’ (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) of a practical argument. The chapter also provides relevant information regarding the methodology of research, in particular the metaphor identification procedure, corpus-related issues, and the pragma-dialectical reconstruction procedure of the argumentative discourse.

Neagu, Maria-Ionela. Decoding Political Discourse: Conceptual Metaphors and Argumentation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137309907.

It must be stated from the outset that the empirical investigation developed in this book does not concern the truthfulness or falsity of certain claims advanced by the political actors whose discourse is under focus, but the way in which they support or attack different standpoints whenever a difference of opinion arises.

I adopt the shared view of politics as oriented towards action and underlain by practical reasoning (Kock, 2007; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012). Therefore, political discourse must be perceived as deliberative and argumentative in nature. In addition, the political discourse analysis I conduct is strongly anchored in the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor because my contention is that the analogical reasoning underlying the conceptual metaphors is employed in order to justify certain claims, as ‘the warrants that authorize us to make the step from data to conclusion’ (Toulmin, 1958/2003: 93). Treated as a type of argument by definition, conceptual metaphors must be seen as ‘persuasive efforts that encourage intersubjective agreement about how to see the world’ (Schiappa, 2003: 129). Therefore, they should be critically questioned and evaluated.

‘Meaning emerges when we use the lens provided by the vehicle of a metaphor to look at its tenor’ (Cohen, 2004: 221). In particular, we can look at politics through the lens provided by the cluster of concepts, beliefs, and attitudes associated with business, war, or ethics (just like Cohen looks at philosophy through the lens provided by issues related to conversation, according to the metaphor ‘philosophy is a voice in the conversation of mankind’).

The metaphor succeeds dialectically if ‘it can be questioned and challenged in several ways, but it can also be extended to meet those challenges’ (Cohen, 2004: 222). Analytically, the metaphor succeeds if the mapping between the source and the target domain is supported by enough points of congruence and there are no strong dissimilarities to rebut the analogy. It is also claimed that the metaphor also succeeds rhetorically once it draws on preexisting frames and shared values and it licenses a shift in thinking and in behavior via ‘the arguments’ reservoir’ (Amossy, 2009: 263), namely by retrieving elements stocked in the collective memory and reconstructing arguments when necessary.

Drawing on Hunston and Thompson’s work (2000), Charteris-Black (2004: 11) accounts for the role of metaphor to articulate the speaker’s standpoint, feelings, and attitude, his inner subjectivity when confronted with a particular situation. To put it differently, from an argumentative perspective ‘any moral value (or institutional fact, such as promises) has to be internalized by the agent as a concern, in order to actually motivate his action (in order for the agent to actually do the action)’ (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012: 48). Although he feels morally concerned or simply frustrated about higher needs, larger personal, social, and intellectual issues (Maslow, 1954/1970), he still engages in some sort of action, becoming the subject of the action by which the person reveals himself. Moreover, his action (argumentation included, as social action) impacts upon himself, creating his moral personality, adjusting his ethos.

It is from these insights in transpersonal psychology and argumentation theories that another claim arises and is accounted for throughout the book. It is often the case that political discourse seeks to bridge a mental void created by people’s lower needs thereby allowing other higher needs to emerge. The social impact presumably engendered by the deprivation of lower needs and values (such as the physiological ones, those related to body security and health, or family values) is nicely acknowledged by Maslow as follows: ‘If a man must feel frustrated or worried, it is better for society that he worry about ending war than about being cold or hungry’ (1954/1970: 70).

Nevertheless, emotional experience, frustration included, arises only when the individual becomes aware of his needs and this, I think, is exactly the goal of political discourse: to activate a certain value system and to engage the people in reconsidering their attitudes, interests, and beliefs with a view to changing their perspective over the future.

The contrastive analysis of the arguers’ metaphorical reasoning in terms of patterns that are preserved or altered will highlight the boundaries of the ‘disagreement space’ (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004: 54) and will reveal the ongoing development of ‘mental event models’ (van Dijk, 2008: 100–101) that contribute to and constrain both the mapping between relevant source and target domains and their subsequent integration into the premises of a practical argument. Therefore, the discourse analyst must first engage in making sense of the metaphor and then use its meanings to decode the premises of an argument.

As regards the overall goal of this research, the work seeks to connect critical discourse analysis, pragma-dialectics, and cognitive linguistics in a coherent analytical framework placing conceptual metaphors in the centre of this enterprise aiming to more clearly articulate the socio-psychological significance of conceptual metaphors and their place and role in argumentation. The empirical investigation relies on the corpus of the three American Presidential debates in 2008 (transcripts from the site of the Commission on Presidential Debates), Barack Obama’s State of the Nation in 2009, and the State of the Union Addresses in 2010 and 2011 (transcripts from AmericanRhetoric.com).

Critical discourse analysis supports the idea that social reality is ‘conceptually mediated,’; therefore, it may be argued that political discourse permeability is due to its access to people’s mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) via neural binding circuitry (Lakoff, 2009: 25ff) and conceptual connections generated by previous discourse, and to people’s mental void that emerges as a result of their needs and frustrations (Maslow, 1954/1970). Placing the political discourse at the crossroads of cognitive linguistics and transpersonal psychology represents a new perspective in the field.

Drawing on the principles and techniques of discourse and argument reconstruction and critical evaluation as propounded most notably by Walton (2001, 2005, 2006, 2007), van Eemeren et al. (1994, 2009), van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004, 2010), and Isabela and Norman Fairclough (2012), the research accounts for the fact that most pragmatic devices are consciously created and employed by politicians to persuade their audience of the feasibility of their political plans, rather than to ‘go beyond confrontation and polemic’ (Fairclough, 2003: 44) and to find solutions that may contribute to the resolution of their controversies. Therefore, such instances allow them to outline their own individuality that dissociates them from their opponents and from all those who do not share their views.

In Chapter 2 a combination of critical discourse analysis, argumentation theory (pragma-dialectics), and cognitive semantics (conceptual metaphor theory) is advocated to account for the production and reconstruction of meaning in political discourse. While providing a short critical overview of the main concepts and central tenets of these fields and attempting to connect them into a coherent framework, this chapter also outlines the methodology of research, particularly the stages that have led to the identification and interpretation of conceptual metaphors, and the pragma-dialectical reconstruction procedure of the argumentative discourse. The new framework for the analysis and evaluation of practical reasoning as propounded by Isabela and Norman Fairclough (2012) is also introduced and adopted with a view to identifying the place and the role of conceptual metaphors in the development of practical arguments. It is therefore argued that conceptual metaphors are persuasive definitions that should be treated as defensible arguments by definition or by analogy inasmuch as they steer the argument towards a particular conclusion and proposal for action once embedded in the premises of a practical argument.

Moreover, drawing on insights into transpersonal psychology, more specifically into Maslow’s needs pyramid and developmental theory, I attempt to outline the extent to which political discourse may contribute to the gratification of people’s lower needs and to the attainment of their full potential, by imposing a new model, a new image of reality. Furthermore, Teun A. van Dijk’s theory of ‘context models’ (2008) accounts for the cognitive basis of practical argumentation and brings additional evidence that supports the analysis of conceptual metaphors as arguments or as premises embedded in a practical argument. Both perspectives enhance the social-psychological significance of the conceptual metaphors focusing on their ability to activate certain mental frames in the ‘cognitive unconscious’ (Lakoff, 2004) that would result into cognitive and behavioral change in society development.

My contention is that social practices and the general context in which societies live keep issuing a great range of problems for the individual who internalizes them (or even appropriates them) as a series of needs, concerns, and frustrations. Different individuals at different levels of society appropriate these problems differently. Thus, depending on each individual’s habitus (his or her predispositions and capital, in Bourdieu’s terms), the mental void created around these needs and frustrations becomes larger or narrower. In addition, political discourse is in itself a means of enlarging, or rather, narrowing this mental void by selling hopes and clues, but not solutions. Solutions are visible in the real change of the specific policies that follow the discourse. These policies should enact the necessary values that will bridge this void and release the man to worry about larger issues.

Divided into four sections, Chapter 3 aims to identify, analyze, and interpret instances of cognitive metaphors created by Barack Obama and John McCain during the Presidential debates in 2008 while dealing with topics such as: the financial crisis, energy independence, the health care system, education, and military conflicts.

Taking into account that Bush administration promoted Republican values, it is assumed that McCain, as an advocate of the same party, will adopt specific behavior similar to that of incumbents, whereas Obama will take over the challenger’s task, that is to make the status quo appear inadequate by exhibiting greater use of face-threatening acts than his opponent.

Researchers in critical metaphor analysis will always face the problem of retrieving the relevant data from the corpus because metaphors are not related to any particular linguistic forms. Consequently, a number of methodological stages have been proposed (Pragglejaz Group, 2007; Charteris-Black, 2004; Cameron and Low, 1999) in order to increase the reliability of the research.

Unlike the mechanic analysis conducted by specialized corpus software, the manual corpus-driven identification of metaphors does not always start from the most frequent word forms, as reading the corpus line by line is a realistic performance only in the case of small corpora designed by the researcher. However, even though the focus is not on frequency, the researcher still works on every lexical unit trying to establish ‘whether there is a tension between a literal source domain and a metaphoric target domain’ (Charteris-Black, 2004: 34–35).

In the second and third stages of the procedure, the ones related to metaphor interpretation and explanation, I have followed different strategies especially when working on the text of the 2008 American Presidential debates, which made up my ‘primary’ corpus. Aiming to analyze the hidden meanings of the language used in presidential speeches, I have opted to compile my own corpus of 48,000 words that would allow for an in-depth analysis of conceptual metaphors, politeness strategies, and argumentation schemes in their discursive and social contexts.

First, as I have tried to contrast the two candidates’ metaphorical reasoning, I have identified the metaphorical linguistic expressions associated with several target domains (as already specified) that seemed to be the foci of discussion. Metaphors such as HEALTH IS MERCHANDISE – HEALTH IS COMMODITY, CRISIS IS DISEASE – CRISIS IS CALAMITY, POLITICS IS ETHICS – POLITICS IS WAR – POLITICS IS BUSINESS pervade the arguers’ discourses and frame their standpoints, rendering the political world intelligible and empirical.

Second, my intention has been to pursue the discussants’ metaphorical reasoning regarding domestic policy issues, on the one hand, and foreign policy issues, on the other. Moreover, I have interpreted the conceptual metaphors that arise from the questions addressed by the audience members, as they reveal the way in which reality is framed at the grassroots level.

As regards domestic policy issues, the analysis relying on Boston Consulting Group (BCG) strategy of resource distribution, known as BCG Growth-Share Matrix (1998), will highlight the idea that economic principles can be translated through metaphor into real politics and will facilitate the creation of what I have called the PRODUCT LIFE-CYCLE metaphor, according to which the country becomes a company that prioritizes its opportunities depending on the financial benefits they provide (or fail to provide) or the investment they require.

Foreign policy issues, on the other hand, are framed around the metaphor POLITICS IS ETHICS, which is considered to subsume all metaphorical expressions that derive from related source domains. ETHICS is considered the hypernym of CONFLICT, COMBAT, FRIENDSHIP, or TRUST. The recurrent metaphor POLITICS IS (LACK OF) ETHICS ensures the coherence of the American debates inasmuch as its systematicity delineates on the one hand, the Democratic perspective on politics as involvin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• 1   Introduction
• 2   Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Political Discourse Analysis
• 3   Decoding Conceptual Metaphors
• 4   Symbolic Power and Argumentation
• 5   Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix: Corpus
• Bibliography
• Index of Conceptual Metaphors
• General Index