The use of metaphor and evaluation as discourse strategies in pre-electoral debates: Just about winning votes (original) (raw)

2016, Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction. Multimodal and Cross-linguistics Perspectives

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, 2003) 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 an election, rather than due to ideological reasons. Moreover, metaphor and evaluation are often realized by the same linguistic expressions. Keywords: metaphor, evaluation, political discourse, pre-electoral debate, cross-cultural, persuasion, Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory, argumentative strategies.

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