Metaphors in political communication: A case study of the use of deliberate metaphors in non-institutional political interviews

This article analyses the use of (deliberate) metaphors in political discourse produced
by French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians during non-institutional
political interviews. The article first investigates if the use of deliberate
metaphor limits itself to a particular type of political discourse (i.e. public and
institutional political discourse) or if metaphor use is also found in other types
of settings (i.e. non-institutional political discourse). Second, the article analyses
the variation of deliberate metaphor use between political actors depending
on gender, seniority and political affiliation. To this end, the article applies
Steen’s (2008) three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis on biographical
interviews conducted with French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians
(RMPs). Our results indicate that RMPs, when using non-deliberate metaphors,
mostly rely on source domains such as 'construction', 'battle' and 'relationships'.
This is in contrast with the use of deliberate metaphors, where source
domains like 'sports', 'nature' and 'container' take the upper hand.