Abstract
In recent years, the specter of populism has grown increasingly restless in the Western world and beyond. This new populism has been observed in different political movements in Europe; the Brexit movement in the UK, Podemos and Vox in Spain, Rassemblement National in France, Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, and Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary. Inevitably, it is most commonly associated with the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA in 2016. In this paper, a pragmatic interaction theory of metaphorical utterances is applied to a corpus of speeches given by candidates during the American 2016 presidential elections. First, speeches and candidates were graded for populism according to a holistic grading method. Secondly, speeches were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate if and how active metaphorical language was used to construct the populist frame. The findings suggest that active metaphors can be useful for politicians who wish to counter the dominant conventional frames, and so can serve the ideological purposes of populists and non-populists alike. Therefore, this paper also argues that novel metaphorical concepts and active metaphorical utterances make important contributions to the communication of ideologies in political discourse and should not be overlooked by analysts.
About the author
John Keating is currently completing a PhD in linguistics at the University of Granada. His research focuses on the pragmatic analysis of metaphor in political discourse.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Belén Soria for comments on earlier drafts, as well as the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions significantly improved this paper.
References
Arcimavičienė, Liudmila. 2019. Self and other metaphors as facilitating features of populist style in diplomatic discourse: A case study of Obama and Putin’s speeches. In Marcia Macaulay (ed.), Populist discourse, 89–123. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-3-319-97388-3_4Search in Google Scholar
Aslanidis, Paris. 2016. Is populism an ideology? A refutation and a new perspective. Political Studies 64(1S). 88–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12224.Search in Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1983. Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition 11(3). 211–227. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03196968.Search in Google Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi & Andrew S. Ross. 2019. Trumpian tweets and populist politics: A corpus-assisted discourse analytical study. In Ruth Breeze & Ana M. Fernández-Vallejo (eds.), Populist discourse across modes and media, 21–38. Peter Lang: Bern.Search in Google Scholar
Black, Max. 1954–1955. Metaphor. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55. 273–294.10.1093/aristotelian/55.1.273Search in Google Scholar
Black, Max. 1977. More about metaphor. Dialectica 31(3/4). 431–457. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.1977.tb01296.x.Search in Google Scholar
Black, Max. 1979. How metaphors work: A reply to Donald Davidson. Critical Inquiry 6(1). 131–143. https://doi.org/10.1086/448033.Search in Google Scholar
Bonikowski, Bart & Noam Gidron. 2016. Multiple traditions in populism research: Toward a theoretical synthesis. APSA Comparative Politics Newsletter 26(12). 7–14.10.2139/ssrn.2875372Search in Google Scholar
Bort-Mir, Lorena, Marianna Bolognesi & Susan Ghaffaryan. 2020. Cross-cultural interpretation of filmic metaphors: A think-aloud experiment. Intercultural Pragmatics 17(4). 389–416. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2020-4001.Search in Google Scholar
Breeze, Ruth. 2020. Exploring populist styles of political discourse in Twitter. World Englishes 39(4). 550–567. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12496.Search in Google Scholar
Cameron, Lynne. 2003. Metaphor in educational discourse. London/New York: Continuum.Search in Google Scholar
Cameron, Lynne. 2008. Metaphor shifting in the dynamics of talk. In Mara Sophia Zanotto, Lynne Cameron & Marilda C. Cavalcanti (eds.), Confronting metaphor in use: An applied linguistic approach, 45–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.173.04camSearch in Google Scholar
Cameron, Lynne & Alice Deignan. 2006. The emergence of metaphor in discourse. Journal of Applied Linguistics 27. 671–6. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml032.Search in Google Scholar
Carlin, Ryan E., Kirk A. Hawkins, Levente Littvay, Jennifer McCoy & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2019. Conclusion. In Kirk A. Hawkins, Ryan E. Carlin, Levente Littvay & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.), The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis, 419–437. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230000612Search in Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2005. Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230501706Search in Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2019. Metaphors of Brexit. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-3-030-28768-9Search in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 1996. Security metaphors: Cold war discourse from containment to common house. New York: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2017. “The people” in populist discourse: Using neuro-cognitive linguistics to understand political meanings. Journal of Language and Politics 16(4). 582–594. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17031.chi.Search in Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.Search in Google Scholar
Engelhardt, Tom. 2004. Draining the Swamp. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/draining-swamp/(accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Flusberg, Stephen J., Teenie Matlock & Paul H. Thibodeau. 2018. War metaphors in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 33(1). 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2018.1407992.Search in Google Scholar
Forceville, Charles. 1996. Pictorial metaphor in advertising. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203272305Search in Google Scholar
Forceville, Charles. 2020. Visual and multimodal communication: Applying the relevance principle. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190845230.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Freeden, Michael. 1998. Is nationalism a distinct ideology? Political Studies XLVI. 748–765. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00165.Search in Google Scholar
Freeden, Michael. 2006. Ideology and political theory. Journal of Political Ideologies 11(1). 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310500395834.Search in Google Scholar
Freelon, Deen. 2020. ReCal for Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio Data (OIR). http://dfreelon.org/utils/recalfront/(accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Gentner, Dedre. 1983. Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework. Cognitive Science 7(2). 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0702_3.Search in Google Scholar
Gentner, Dedre & Brian Bowdle. 2008. Metaphor as structure-mapping. In Raymond W. GibbsJr. (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 109–128. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511816802.008Search in Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond WJr. 1994. The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language and understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W.Jr. 2011. Are “deliberate” metaphors really deliberate? A question of human consciousness and action. Metaphor and the Social World 1(1). 26–52. https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.1.1.03gib.Search in Google Scholar
Goatly, Andrew. 1997. The language of metaphors. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203210000Search in Google Scholar
Goatly, Andrew. 2007. Washing the brain. Metaphor and hidden ideology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.10.1075/dapsac.23Search in Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Hawkins, Kirk A. 2016. United States 2016 presidential campaign speeches dataset. Available for download at populism.byu.edu (accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Hawkins, Kirk A. & Bruno Castanho Silva. 2019. Textual analysis: “Big data approaches”. In Kirk A. Hawkins, Ryan E. Carlin, Levente Littvay & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.), The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis, 27–48. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315196923Search in Google Scholar
Hawkins, Kirk A., Ryan E. Carlin, Levente Littvay & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.). 2019 The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315196923Search in Google Scholar
He, Sui. 2021. Cognitive metaphor theories in translation studies: Toward a dual-model parametric approach. Intercultural Pragmatics 18(1). 25–52. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2021-0002.Search in Google Scholar
Heyvaert, Pauline, François Randour, Jérémy Dodeigne, Julien Perrez & Min Reuchamps. 2020. Metaphors in political communication: A case study of the use of deliberate metaphors in non-institutional political interviews. Journal of Language and Politics 19(2). 201–225. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17057.hey.Search in Google Scholar
Hidalgo-Tenorio, Encarnación & Miguel-Ángel Benítez-Castro. 2021. Trump’s populist discourse and affective politics, or on how to move ‘the People’ through emotion. Globalisation, Societies and Education. 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1861540.Search in Google Scholar
Indurkhya, Bipin. 1986. Constrained semantic transference: A formal theory of metaphors. Synthese 68(3). 515–551. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00413622.Search in Google Scholar
Jagers, Jan & Stefaan Walgrave. 2007. Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium. European Journal of Political Research 46(3). 319–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2006.00690.x.Search in Google Scholar
Keating, John & Belén Soria. 2019. Populist metaphorical utterances. In Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio, Miguel-Ángel Benítez-Castro & Francesca De Cesare (eds.), Populist discourse: Critical approaches to contemporary politics, 209–226. Oxon/New York: Routledge.10.4324/9780429026751-13Search in Google Scholar
Kelly, John. 2016. What’s with all Trump’s talk about “draining the swamp”? Slate. https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/10/why-do-trump-and-his-supports-keep-talking-about-draining-the-swamp.html (accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Kittay, Eva F. 1987. Metaphor: Its cognitive force and linguistic structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Search in Google Scholar
Krippendorff, Klaus. 2004. Reliability in content analysis: Some common misconceptions and recommendations. Human Communication Research 30(3). 411–433. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/30.3.411.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1992. Metaphor and war. The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. In Martin Pütz (ed.), Thirty years of linguistic evolution. Studies in honour of René Dirven, 463–81. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.61.36lakSearch in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought, 2nd edn., 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139173865.013Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2008. The political mind: Why you can’t understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain. New York: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Turner. 1989. More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226470986.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Lewis, Paul, Seán Clarke & Caelainn Barr. 2019. How we combed leaders’ speeches to gauge populist rise. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/06/how-we-combed-leaders-speeches-to-gauge-populist-rise (accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Maynard, Jonathan L. & Matto Mildenberger. 2016. Convergence and divergence in the study of ideology: A critical review. British Journal of Political Science 48(2). 563–589. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007123415000654.Search in Google Scholar
Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.10.1515/9780804799331Search in Google Scholar
Mudde, Cas. 2004. The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition 39(4). 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x.Search in Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2004. Metaphor and political discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230504516Search in Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2012. The study of metaphor as part of critical discourse analysis. Critical Discourse Studies 9(3). 301–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2012.688300.Search in Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2016. Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. London/New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.Search in Google Scholar
Pappas, Takis S. 2019. Populism and liberal democracy: A comparative and theoretical analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780198837886.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Perrez, Julien & Min Reuchamps. 2014. Deliberate metaphors in political discourse: The case of citizen discourse. Metaphorik.de 25. 7–41.Search in Google Scholar
Perrez, Julien, Min Reuchamps & Paul H. Thibodeau (eds.). 2019. Variation in Political Metaphor. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.10.1075/dapsac.85Search in Google Scholar
Rahn, Wendy. 2019. Populism in the US: The evolution of the Trump constituency. In Kirk A. Hawkins, Ryan E. Carlin, Levente Littvay & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.), The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis, 350–373. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Recanati, François. 2004. Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511615382Search in Google Scholar
Reijnierse, W. Gudrun, Christian Burgers, Tina Krennmayr & Gerard J. Steen. 2018. DMIP: A method for identifying potentially deliberate metaphor in language use. Corpus Pragmatics 2(2). 129–147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-017-0026-7.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 1997–1998. Stylistic analysis and novel metaphor. Pragmalinguistica 5–6. 373–389. https://doi.org/10.25267/pragmalinguistica.1997.i5.16.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2005a. Metaphoric concepts and language. In Juan J. Acero & Paolo Leonardi (eds.), Facets of concepts, 177–200. Padua: Il Poligrafo.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2005b. Cognitive metaphor theory revisited. Journal of Literary Semantics 34. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1515/jlse.2005.34.1.1.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2007. A view of novel metaphor in the light of Recanati’s proposals. In María J. Frápolli (ed.), Saying, meaning and referring. Essays on François Recanati’s philosophy of language, 145–59. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2013. Anomaly in novel metaphor and experimental tests. Journal of Literary Semantics 42(1). 31–57. https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2013-0004.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2014. Relevance theory and metaphor. Linguagem em (Dis)curso 14(3). 489–509. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-4017-140303-0314.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2016. Against Lepore and Stone’s sceptic account of metaphorical meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 16(2). 145–72.Search in Google Scholar
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria. 2019. Semantic content and compositional context-sensitivity. Theoria 42(1). 51–71. https://doi.org/10.1387/theoria.17683.Search in Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1978. Literal meaning. Erkenntnis 13. 207–224. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00160894.Search in Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1993 [1979]. Metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought, 2nd edn., 83–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139173865.008Search in Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995 [1986]. Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 2012. A deflationary account of metaphors. In Dierdre, Wilson & Dan Sperber (eds.), Meaning and relevance, 97–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139028370.007Search in Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard. 2008. The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol 23(4). 213–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480802426753.Search in Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard. 2017. Deliberate Metaphor Theory: Basic assumptions, main tenets, urgent issues. Intercultural Pragmatics 14(1). 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2017-0001.Search in Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard, Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal, Tina Krennmayr & Tryntje Pasma. 2010. A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.10.1075/celcr.14Search in Google Scholar
Taggart, Paul A. 2000. Populism. Buckingham: Open University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Team Populism. 2019. Coding rubric and anchor texts for the global populism database. https://populism.byu.edu/Pages/Publications (accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Weyland, Kurt. 2001. Clarifying a contested concept: Populism in the study of Latin American politics. Comparative Politics 34(1). 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412.Search in Google Scholar
Widmer, Ted. 2017. Draining the swamp. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/draining-the-swamp (accessed 26 July 2020).Search in Google Scholar
Zinken, Jörg & Andreas Musolff. 2009. A discourse-centred perspective on metaphorical meaning and understanding. In Andreas Musolff & Jörg Zinken (eds.), Metaphor and discourse, 1–8. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230594647_1Search in Google Scholar
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
