A Cognitive Approach to the Figures of Speech of Political Rhetoric: With a Reference to the U.S. Presidential Election Debates from 2000 to 2016

Abstract

As for political rhetoric, most of the previous studies of presidential election TV debates have been focused on the type and number of words and sentences used by individual candidates, the impact of the debates on polls, the turn-takings, and the roles of gender, whereas little attention has been paid to the figurative languages used in political debates. For these reasons, the purpose of this study is to analyze the figurative expressions of the U.S. presidential election debates from 2000 to 2016 from the perspective of cognitive semantics and find out the figures of speech and the strategies of the candidates and their parties in terms of a long-term changes of political rhetoric. The figurative speeches used for the analysis in this study are conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and combinational metaphor. The findings in this paper are as follows. First, Democrats mostly used figurative language in terms of human and social issues and tax-reduction. Second, Republicans mostly used figurative language in terms of collaborators, allies, places and date of terror. In other words, with regard to the uses of figurative language the main concerns of each party were domestic policy for Democrats and foreign policy for Republicans, respectively. Finally, figurative languages employed by each political party were found to be much more inclined to use conceptual metaphor by Democrats and to use conceptual metonymy by Republicans, respectively.