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Institute of the Liberal Arts

Alan Cienki
Researching conceptual metaphors that (may) underlie political discourse

Alan Cienki Emory University

Of the various approaches to metaphor which make cognitive claims, one that has gained significant attention is conceptual metaphor theory. Articulated and popularized by Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999) the theory has been applied to numerous domains, including politics (Lakoff 1996/2000).

A main tenet behind the theory is that we can deduce ways in which people think of one domain in terms of another (conceptual metaphors) from patterns of metaphoric expressions in their speech or writing. However, the theory has come under criticism because of a lack of methodological rigor in its development and application (e.g., Murphy 1996; Cameron and Low 1999). In recent years concerted efforts have been made to apply the theory in ways that are more methodologically sound (e.g., Steen 2002; Cameron 2003). This process has led to qualifications in what we can and cannot expect to show with the theory. For example, more attention is being paid to the graded nature of metaphoricity (e.g., Müller 2004), and how metaphors may be more or less salient, and so more or less likely to be the object of conscious awareness -- to the speakers or writer, and potentially to the audience as well.

The first part of the paper involves a discussion of two sets of conceptual metaphors (metaphorical models) which Lakoff (1996/2002) claims underlie the logic of (American) right- versus left-wing political rhetoric. One difficulty is that the models were devised in an intuitive way, rather than empirically, and so in an earlier project (Cienki 2003; 2004; in press) I tested the models using the debates before the US presidential elections in 2000 as data. That research revealed limited direct expression of the proposed metaphors in the candidates' language, but the logic of the metaphors appeared in many of their non-metaphorical statements. Additional analysis showed some relevance of the proposed metaphors to the candidates' manual gestures while speaking (in the form of metaphoric gestures).

In the second part of the paper moves from testing metaphorical models that have been proposed previously to considering a method for deducing conceptual metaphors on an empirical basis, namely through the use of a pile-sort task. In the initial stage, the transcripts of the political debates mentioned above, were coded for all metaphorical expressions deemed salient according to a given set of criteria. Second, subjects were asked to sort slips of paper with the individual metaphorical expressions into piles of what they consider to be related expressions. And third, the subjects were asked to state what pattern they see in each set of expressions they grouped together. Calculating which expressions fell into the same groups most frequently, using multidimensional scaling, and seeing how subjects themselves labelled the groups, can be argued to provide evidence for some of the conceptual metaphors which subjects (who were not linguists or political scientists) use in understanding the expressions. This provides a way of proposing metaphorical models from the bottom up. Preliminary findings from a pilot study were presented.

To sum up, the paper involves work on metaphor and political discourse in two directions: first, the application of theory to data, and second, the deduction of theory from data. Methods from cognitive psychology were employed to test recent linguistic theory that has made psychological claims about metaphor as it relates to political language and thought.