How elites talk about their political career: Metaphors in spontaneous and informal political discourse

It has often been acknowledged that political discourse is a genre that naturally allows for metaphor use. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated the importance of analysing the political impact of these metaphors: “Examining metaphors that appear in political discourse provides insights into the way speakers understand their situation, and how they seek to accomplish their ends” (Ritchie, 2013). Previous research (Perrez&Reuchamps, 2014) has demonstrated the usefulness of applying Steen’s three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis in communication to a corpus of political discourse. I therefore propose to apply this model to a particular type of elite discourse. The corpus used for this research consists of biographical interviews conducted with Walloon politicians, each describing at length their personal political career within the political dynamics of their country. This corpus offers an interesting ground of investigation because of its spontaneous and informal character. Moreover, most studies on the use of metaphors in political discourse tend to focus on elite discourse with the underlying assumption that elites might knowingly use metaphors to convince the audience. What is interesting with our corpus, is that the interviews do not have a clear addressee or audience.
Analysing the form, and particularly the metaphor use of these interviews comes with a number of questions: (i) do politicians use metaphors in spontaneous discourse; (ii) if so, when and (iii) why do they use these metaphors, i.e. do they use them with a specific purpose, as for example explaining a complex political issue, or not?
To assess the extent to which politicians use metaphors in spontaneous discourse, we conducted a corpus analysis by applying the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al., 2010) in order to identify potential metaphorical contexts. In line with Steen’s three-dimensional model, we subsequently analysed the identified metaphors by making a distinction between three different layers of metaphor, respectively at the linguistic, conceptual and communicative level.