Sports Metaphors in American Political Discourse

Abstract

In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of an idea in terms of another familiar object. As conceptual metaphors are great persuasive means due to their ability to make unfamiliar things familiar, we have analyzed transcripts of recent political speeches with a special reference to presidential campaign speeches (2016-2019). It should be noted that the usage of conceptual metaphors is strictly linked to cultural patterns, i.e. Asian people tend to use conceptual metaphors of eating or family, while Western politicians tend to rely on sport, driving or war metaphors. The thing is that they consciously, subconsciously or even unconsciously view their lives as a race, a game or a battle. Our analysis is based on Western presidential campaign speeches. As an outcome of our analysis we wanted to reveal and elucidate that particular link between culture and cognitive linguistics.