Religious Metaphors in Public Speeches of Turkish Politicians

Olena Polova

doi:10.7596/taksad.v9i1.2304

Abstract

Religion is an integral part of culture of the Turkish people. An important feature of the cultural and socio-political sphere of Turkey is the frequent use of expressions with religious content, among which metaphor is prominent. This study investigates religious metaphors used by Turkish politicians. The data analysis is carried out on the basis of the material obtained by means of a self-compiled corpus, which consists of public speeches of Turkish politicians (e.g., the President, deputies, and leaders of the main political parties of Turkey) for the period of 2010-2019. The paper claims that the core religious beliefs of the Turks have a great impact on the way they see and perceive the surrounding reality, which is reflected in metaphorical expressions they use. Therefore, Turkish politicians often associate other political figures, political processes, and events of social and political life with religious characters, episodes, and phenomena. This principle formed the basis of the model of “Social and Political Reality is Religion” for its analysis on the metaphoric expressions. The analysis suggests that metaphor is a significant tool of representing Islamic ethics in Turkish public discourse. Despite the fact that a religious metaphoric model is often characterized by positive emotionality, the aforementioned model has both positive and negative connotations.

Highlights

Metaphor has long been the focus of scholars of various fields of knowledge and has become the subject of research of philological sciences, which predominantly interpret it as a stylistic figure, and of those sciences exploring consciousness, conceptual system, mind, etc
One of the key methods of this study is based on a corpus-driven Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) developed by Charteris-Black
The analyses presented in the foregoing sections make it possible to claim that religious metaphors are independent communicative and cognitive units in public speeches of Turkish politicians

Summary

Introduction

Metaphor has long been the focus of scholars of various fields of knowledge and has become the subject of research of philological sciences, which predominantly interpret it as a stylistic figure, and of those sciences exploring consciousness, conceptual system, mind, etc. Inspired by Kövecses (2005), we interpret metaphor as a means of reproduction in the language of the process of transferring knowledge from one conceptual sphere into another on the basis of association or similarity, which is able to reflect a national culture and national mentality. Such a definition is key to our research, because the present study deals with the linguocultural specificity of metaphors in public speeches of Turkish politicians. It should be noted that in the world Turkology the issue of religious metaphors in Turkish linguoculture and political communication is undeservedly out of the attention of linguists, which determines the relevance of our study

Methodological framework

Data collection procedure

Data analysis procedures

Conclusions