Abstract
Lakoff (1996/2002) claims that left-wing and right-wing political rhetoric is structured around different idealized models of the family - a Nurturant Parent (NP) and a Strict Father (SF) model, respectively. Each model involves a different set of underlying family-based metaphors. A previous study analyzed the debates between George W. Bush and A1 Gore before the US election in 2000 for NP and SF metaphorical expressions as well as non-metaphorical expressions which were entailed by the NP or SF model. Two hypotheses are tested with these same data for the present paper: Hypothesis 1: Because it is political rhetoric, the ratio of metaphorical expressions to non-metaphorical entailments should be higher for the subset of utterances with 'family' words (such as family, children, parents) than in the corpus overall. Hypothesis 2: 'Family' words should be used in (a) metaphorical expressions and/or (b) entailments of the NP and SF models more frequently than other words in the debates that occur with similar frequencies. Only the second hypothesis is found to be supported, and a qualitative analysis of the non-metaphorical entailments sheds further light on differences between the two speakers' use of family terms. The significance of these findings for the status of the proposed models is also considered.
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