How to identify moral language in presidential speeches: A comparison between a social-psychological and a cognitive-linguistic approach to corpus analysis
-
Kiki Y. Renardel de Lavalette
,
Gerard Steen
Abstract
Lakoff (2002 [1996], Moral politics. How liberals and conservative think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) presents the Theory of Moral Politics (TMR), as based in the roles of metaphor in moral thinking in American Politics. Two distinct methods of data analysis, one social-psychological and one cognitive-linguistic, have been employed to empirically test Lakoff’s assertions on moral reasoning, but have yielded different results. We applied both methods to the same corpus of speeches to determine whether they would yield similar results and could thus be considered to be equally appropriate ways of testing the presence of moral language. We show that the method affects what sort of conclusion can be drawn from research. Consequently, when testing TMR, we recommend that the corpus-linguistic method used is critically evaluated.
Funding statement: The contribution of Christian Burgers was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO VENI grant 275-89-020).
Acknowledgment
All complete coding schemes and data files are fully available from the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/v89nq/.
When the research was conducted, Kiki Y. Renardel de Lavalette was a Master Student in Communication and Information Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She is now a PhD candidate at the Department of Dutch Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The authors would like to thank Dr. Stefanie Wulff and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
References
Bar-Lev, Zev. 2007. Reframing moral politics. Journal of Language and Politics 6(3). 459–474. doi: 10.1075/jlp.6.3.11barSearch in Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan & Andreas Musolff. 2003. ‘Battered hero’ or ‘innocent victim’? A comparative study of metaphors for euro trading in British and German financial reporting. English for Specific Purposes 22. 153–176. doi: 10.1016/S0889-4906(02)00012-1.Search in Google Scholar
Cienki, Alan. 2005. Metaphor in the “Strict Father” and “Nurturant Parent” cognitive models: Theoretical issues raised in an empirical study. Cognitive Linguistics 16(2). 279–312. doi: 10.1515/cogl.2005.16.2.279Search in Google Scholar
Deason, Grace & Mari H. Gonzales. 2012. Moral politics in the 2008 presidential convention acceptance speeches. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 34(3). 254–268. doi: 10.1080/01973533.2012.674450.Search in Google Scholar
Deason, Grace, Brad Lippmann, Marti H. Gonzales & Jennifer Filson. 2008. Exploring Uncle Sam: The role of family metaphors in political attitudes. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Paris, France, 08 July.Search in Google Scholar
Koller, Veronika. 2008. Metaphor and gender in business media discourse. A critical cognitive study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Kotrlik, Joe W. & Heather A. Williams. 2003. The incorporation of effect size in information technology, learning, and performance research. Information Technology, Learning, and Performance Journal 21(1). 1–7.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2002 [1996]. Moral politics. How liberals and conservative think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226471006.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Landis, J. Richard & Gary G. Koch. 1977. The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33(1). 159–174. doi: 10.2307/2529310Search in Google Scholar PubMed
Level playing-field. n.d. In MacMillan Dictionary online. Retrieved from http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/level-playing-field.Search in Google Scholar
Moses, Jennifer F. & Marti H. Gonzales. 2015. Strong candidate, nurturant candidate: Moral language in presidential television advertisements. Political Psychology 36(4). 379–397. doi: 10.1111/pops.12160.Search in Google Scholar
Ohl, Jessy J., Damien S. Pfister, Martin Nader & Dana Griffin. 2013. Lakoff’s Theory of Moral Reasoning in presidential campaign advertisements, 1952–2012. Communication Studies 64(5). 488–507. doi: 10.1080/10510974.2013.832340.Search in Google Scholar
Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22(1). 1–39. doi: 10.1080/10926480709336752Search in Google Scholar
Semino, Elena. 2008. Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511816802.015Search in Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard J. 2005. Basic discourse acts: Towards a psychological theory of discourse segmentation. In Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & M. Sandra Peña Cervel (eds.), Cognitive linguistics: Internal dynamics and interdisciplinary interaction, 283–312. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Search in Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard J., Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr & Trijntje Pasma. 2010. A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/celcr.14Search in Google Scholar
Wolters, H.C. 2012. Is Bush a strict father and Obama a nurturing parent? Metaphorical expressions of moral value systems in American politics. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam MA thesis.Search in Google Scholar
©2019 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- How to identify moral language in presidential speeches: A comparison between a social-psychological and a cognitive-linguistic approach to corpus analysis
- Grammatical construction of function words between old and modern written Arabic: A corpus-based analysis
- Definite article bridging relations in L2: A learner corpus study
- Against statistical significance testing in corpus linguistics
- How do English translations differ from non-translated English writings? A multi-feature statistical model for linguistic variation analysis
- Prototype-driven alternations: The case of German weak nouns
- The alternative negative constructions in spoken and written Korean: Logistic regression analysis
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- How to identify moral language in presidential speeches: A comparison between a social-psychological and a cognitive-linguistic approach to corpus analysis
- Grammatical construction of function words between old and modern written Arabic: A corpus-based analysis
- Definite article bridging relations in L2: A learner corpus study
- Against statistical significance testing in corpus linguistics
- How do English translations differ from non-translated English writings? A multi-feature statistical model for linguistic variation analysis
- Prototype-driven alternations: The case of German weak nouns
- The alternative negative constructions in spoken and written Korean: Logistic regression analysis
