Variation in political metaphor: A diachronic study of metaphor use in TV debates about Belgian federalism

Building on an interdisciplinary approach bringing together political science and linguistics, this paper focuses on the usage of metaphors to describe the evolution of federalism in the country over time. This research more specifically undertakes a systematic analysis of the use of metaphors by Belgian politicians during television debates from the 1980’s until now. The aim of our paper is twofold: firstly, we would like to determine which metaphorical frames have been used by the political actors to describe the establishment and evolution of the Belgian federal system; secondly, we would like to understand how the use of given metaphorical frames varies according to a set of variables related (i) to the political context, (ii) to the political affiliation of the participants and (iii) to the communicative nature of the metaphorical mapping (deliberate vs. non-deliberate metaphors).
Our analysis relies on an original longitudinal corpus of 80 television debates covering 40 years from the French-speaking public broadcaster RTBF (approx. 900,000 words), relating to the progressive transformation of Belgium’s political system. These debates have been transcribed and semi-automatically searched for to identify potentially relevant metaphorical contexts. After a manual check, 2,350 contexts have been confirmed as being relevant for our study. These contexts have been analyzed by applying the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al., 2010). Tentative results suggest that some metaphorical frames appear to the same extent throughout the corpus (this for instance the case of the construction and battle frames), whereas other appear to be limited to periods of political crises (such as the relationships frame). This has also been observed for the distinction between non-deliberate and deliberate metaphors, the latter ones appearing to be more frequent in critical political contexts. The full results of our study, also including the question of the variation between the political actors, will be discussed during our presentation.