• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1093

Part of Session 196: Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders (Other abstracts in this session)

Metaphor JOURNEY in Political Language: Is gender a fellow traveller, or is it lost on its way?

Authors: Borčić, Nikolina (1); Anđel, Maja (2)
Submitted by: Anđel, Maja (Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Zagreb, Croatia)

The politics is all about power, and, above all, the power to make decisions. Prime Ministers and Presidents of states have the possibility and responsibility to make decisions. Therefore, the language they use must reflect their position of power. The language of politics contains many strategies for using the language as a means of influence. Successful politicians use the language of persuasion that tells us what is right and what is wrong. In order to effectively convince their listeners of the validity and equitableness of their thoughts, ideas and aims, they enliven their language through the frequent use of linguistics metaphors, which some researchers find useful for achieving higher persuasiveness.

According to recent literature on cognitive metaphors, one of the most frequent underlying conceptual metaphors in political discourse is POLITICS IS JOURNEY (Charteris-Black 2005), that derives from the universal metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Also, the recent discoveries in corpus linguistics (Pennebaker, 2011) suggest that differences in male and female general language are reality.

The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore how female and male politicians realize the conceptual metaphor JOURNEY in their discourse, under the assumption that female and male politicians rely on semantically differently embodied linguistic metaphors to convey their beliefs or messages.

Following on from these theoretical considerations, we analyze interviews given by Croatian politicians Jadranka Kosor and Ivo Josipović, as well as by German politicians Angela Merkel and Christian Wulff. All analyzed interviews were published between July 2010 and December 2012. At this time, Ivo Josipović is the President of Croatia, Christian Wulff the President of Germany and both women are Prime Ministers: Jadranka Kosor of Croatia, and Angela Merkel of Germany. In order to make the female-male comparison, we combine qualitative and (manually performed) quantitative text analysis, focusing on identification and interpretation of source domains.