‘Where there is a will there is a way’: figurative language use and its pragmatic functions in political discourse
-
Silvana Neshkovska
Abstract
Although political discourse is essentially expected to be fact-based and objective, both practice and research show that literal language in political discourse is very often compounded with figurative language. The paper at hand tackles figurative language use in political interviews. For the purposes of this research, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of political interviews given by a former Macedonian female politician – Radmila Shekerinska. The corpus consists of six interviews (with a total duration of about 3 h) in which she answers questions about the political climate and the challenges of North Macedonia in the last couple of decades. The selected interviews are all conducted in English as they are aimed at international audiences and they all fit into the time frame from 2017 to 2021, which practically overlaps with the final years of Shekerinska’s long-standing political career. This study uses a descriptive qualitative research design and focuses, first, on ascertaining the presence of different types of figures of speech in her answers (e.g. metaphors, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, rhetorical questions, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, etc.); then, on identifying the pragmatic functions they perform in the context in which they are used, and finally, on establishing an interface between the figurative language use and the political ideology propagated by this politician. The results point to an extraordinarily resourceful use of a wide spectrum of figurative devices, skillfully intertwined with fact-based political discourse, primarily for addressing highly sensitive political issues, but also for driving important political points home; also, for gaining support from both the domestic and international community regarding the political ideology of this political figure as well as for enhancing the criticism addressed to political adversaries with an additional layer of creative flourish.
Appendix
| Link | Date |
|---|---|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBycIBIfxC0 | 14.12.2017 |
| BBC News – Beyond 100 Days | |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQmZr05cv28 | 4.1.2018 |
| Macedonia’s Defence minister on EU and NATO membership hopes | |
| https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=640394853097078 | 7.03.2019 |
| To NATO and Beyond: A conversation with Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister of the Republic of North Macedonia Radmila Shekerinska | |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-jfN4FYFiA | 10.09. 2020 |
| Radmila Shekerinska: Talking about peace is important, working on peace is more difficult | |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiIaYxqpKK8 | 9.06.2021 |
| EPC Talks Geopolitics with Radmila Šekerinska | |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk6JOz5gQjY | 27.5.2021 |
| SEE Security Platform – Cooperative Security in Southeast Europe – Radmila Shekerinska | |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TcgIRqq0Ro | 14.10. 2021 |
| Western Balkans Summit 2021, Promoting Europe’s inclusiveness and solidarity |
References
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2011. Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor, 2nd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230319899Suche in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing political discourse theory and practice. London and New York: Routledge.10.4324/9780203561218Suche in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2008. Political terminology. In Karlfried Knapp & Gerd Antos (eds.), Handbook of communication in the public sphere. Handbooks of applied linguistics, 225–242. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter (accessed 24 August 2023).10.1515/9783110198980.3.225Suche in Google Scholar
Deignan, Alice, Jeannette Littlemore & Elena Semino. 2013. Fgurative language, genre and register, 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman.Suche in Google Scholar
Feldman, Ofer. 2016. Televised political interviews: A paradigm for analysis. Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research 3(2). 63–82.10.15206/ajpor.2016.3.2.63Suche in Google Scholar
Feldman, Ofer, Ken Kinoshita & Peter Bull. 2015. Culture or communicative conflict? The analysis of equivocation in broadcast Japanese political interviews. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34(1). 65–89.10.1177/0261927X14557567Suche in Google Scholar
Filipczuk-Rosińska, Sylwia. 2016. Analysing metaphorical political discourse in the L2 academic classroom. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 228. 329–334.10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.07.049Suche in Google Scholar
Forgács, Bálint. 2021. The pragmatic functions of metaphorical language. In Judit Gervain G. Csibra & Kristóf Kovács (eds.), A life in cognition: Studies in cognitive science in Honor of Csaba Pléh, 41–57. Cham: Springer Verlag.10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_4Suche in Google Scholar
Galperin, Ilia R. 1977. Stylistics. Moscow: URSS Publisher.Suche in Google Scholar
Gavriely‐Nuri, Dalia. 2009. Friendly fire: War‐normalizing metaphors in the Israeli political discourse. Journal of Peace Education 6(2). 153–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400200903090252.Suche in Google Scholar
Gill, Richard. 1995. Mastering English literature, 2nd edn. New York: Palgrave.10.1007/978-1-349-13596-7Suche in Google Scholar
Glucksberg, Sam. 2001. Understanding figurative language: From metaphor to idioms. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195111095.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar
Holman, HughC. 1986. A Handbook to literature, 5th edition New York: Macmillan.Suche in Google Scholar
Jasim, Samir A. 2018. An analysis of metaphor in selected political speeches. Journal University of Kerbala 16(3). 16–25.Suche in Google Scholar
Kennedy, JoeX. 1979. Literature: An introduction to fiction, poetry, and drama. New York: Little Brown and company.Suche in Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2010. Metaphor – A practical introduction. New York: OUP.Suche in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2008. The political mind: Why you can’t understand 21 st century American politics with an 18 th century brain. New York: Viking.Suche in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. & Michael H. Short. 1981. Style in fiction. London: Longman.Suche in Google Scholar
Mihas, Elena I. 2005. Non-literal language in political discourse. In LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 5: Proceedings of the Workshop in General Linguistics, 124–139.Suche in Google Scholar
Miriti, Mary K. & Christopher O. Wesonga. 2017. A critical discourse analysis on the functions of figurative language in Kenyan 2013 electoral speeches. International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research 4(12). 19–34. https://doi.org/10.22192/ijamr.2017.04.12.004.Suche in Google Scholar
Munir, Ahmad. 2014. A stylistic analysis of Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. Yogyakarta: Yogyakarta State University MA thesis.Suche in Google Scholar
Neshkovska, Silvana & Zorica Trajkova. 2020. Coronavirus-inspired metaphors in political discourse. Thesis 9(2). 99–132.10.46763/PALIM2090099nSuche in Google Scholar
Nie, Jing-Bao, Adam L. Gilbertson, Malcom D. Roubaix, Ciara Staunton, Anton V. Niekerk, Joseph D. Tucker & Stuart Rennie. 2016. Healing without waging war: Beyond military metaphors in medicine and HIV cure research. The American Journal of Bioethics 16(10). 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2016.1214305.Suche in Google Scholar
Pavlikova, Zaneta. 2020. The concept of metaphor in political speeches (Metaphors in the electoral speeches of Donald Tump and Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential elections), 313–321. https://conferences.euba.sk/jazykapolitika/www_write/files/2020/pavlikova.Pdf (accessed 9 September 2023).Suche in Google Scholar
Pavlikova, Zaneta. 2022. Figurative language in the speeches of the New British Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss. In Language and politics: At the border of linguistics and political science VII: Collection of contributions from the 7th year of the international scientific conference, 311–318. Bratislava: EKONÓM Publishing House.Suche in Google Scholar
Penninck, Hanne. 2014. An analysis of metaphor used in political speeches responding to the financial crises of 1929 and 2008. Ghent: University of Ghent MA thesis.Suche in Google Scholar
Pérez López, Carla. 2018. A comparative study of war and sport metaphors in political news headlines. Barcelona: Univerzitat Autonoma de Barcelona BA thesis.Suche in Google Scholar
Radmila, Šekerinska. n.d. Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radmila_%C5%A0ekerinska (accessed 21 November 2023).Suche in Google Scholar
Radmila, Šekerinska Vice-President. n.d. PES socialists and democrats. https://pes.eu/about-us/the-party/vice-presidents/radmilasekerinska/ (accessed 21 November 2023).Suche in Google Scholar
Radmila Šekerinska Member of the Parliament; Former Prime Minister of the Former Yugoslav Republic. n.d. ICD Academy for Cultural Democracy. https://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/index.php?radmila-sekerinska (accessed 21 November 2023).Suche in Google Scholar
Van Teeffelen, Toine. 1994. Racism and metaphor: The Palestinian–Israeli conflict in popular literature. Discourse and Society 5(3). 381–405.10.1177/0957926594005003006Suche in Google Scholar
Vestermark, Ida. 2007. Metaphors in politics: A study of the metaphorical personification of America in political discourse. C-extended essay. Lulea University of Technology, ISSN: 1402-1773, ISRN: LTU-CUPP-07/80-SE.Suche in Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth (ed.). 1997. Gender and discourse. London: Sage.10.4135/9781446250204Suche in Google Scholar
Wren, Percival C. & H. Martin. 1990. High school English grammar & composition, new edn. Revised by N.D.V. Prasada Rao. S. Ram Nagar, New Delhi: Chand & Company LTD.Suche in Google Scholar
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Writer and participant visibility in quantitative and qualitative research: a corpus-assisted study of human agent verbs in health science publications
- Speaker positioning in academic instruction: insights from corpus analysis
- The most common graphicons in Mexican Spanish speaking WhatsApp communities composed of school parents
- A multimodal contrastive analysis of regulations and instructions during the COVID-19 lockdown in the context of the Island of Madeira and the United Kingdom
- Conative “kisses” in human-to-animal communication
- Ecological discourse analysis and meaning interpretation of BBC news reports on 2019 Australian bushfires from the perspective of transitivity system
- ‘Where there is a will there is a way’: figurative language use and its pragmatic functions in political discourse
- Undergraduate and postgraduate students’ emails to faculty members: an impoliteness perspective
- Apology strategies in Tashelhit: linguistic realization and religious influence
- Al-Ḥajjāj’s rhetoric of intimidation and humiliation
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Writer and participant visibility in quantitative and qualitative research: a corpus-assisted study of human agent verbs in health science publications
- Speaker positioning in academic instruction: insights from corpus analysis
- The most common graphicons in Mexican Spanish speaking WhatsApp communities composed of school parents
- A multimodal contrastive analysis of regulations and instructions during the COVID-19 lockdown in the context of the Island of Madeira and the United Kingdom
- Conative “kisses” in human-to-animal communication
- Ecological discourse analysis and meaning interpretation of BBC news reports on 2019 Australian bushfires from the perspective of transitivity system
- ‘Where there is a will there is a way’: figurative language use and its pragmatic functions in political discourse
- Undergraduate and postgraduate students’ emails to faculty members: an impoliteness perspective
- Apology strategies in Tashelhit: linguistic realization and religious influence
- Al-Ḥajjāj’s rhetoric of intimidation and humiliation
