Abstract
The contestability of the concept of populism and the variability of its application have given rise to long-lasting discussions about what populist features in discourse are and how these can be empirically determined and tested. This chapter offers a cognitive socio-linguistic approach to evaluating how populist framing in political (diplomatic) discourse can be facilitated through the use of Self and Other metaphors. Its specific aims involve the identification of metaphors in the context of political identity construction and their populist use vis-à-vis the discursive strategies of legitimisation and delegitimisation in the political speeches delivered by Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, two leaders representing opposite leadership styles and ideologies. To achieve the above aims, Arcimavičienė examined the interrelated speeches delivered by President Obama and President Putin in the time span of two years (2014–2015) in the analytical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis by applying Pragglejaz Group’s Metaphor Identification Procedure (2007). This analysis demonstrated that their metaphor use contributes to the framing of these leaders’ populism through the metaphorical extension of the core concept of ‘the people’ onto the concept of ‘the nations,’ and, more importantly, that the discursive strategies of legitimisation and delegitimisation can be used in parallel but with different metaphoric intensity and ideological purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
Classical and quantifiable content analysis refers to a manual coding of a text when trained coders analyse it by means of a codebook. To date, it is complemented by a computer-based methodology , in which a computer carries out the actual analysis.
- 2.
It should be noted that this opposition has its roots in Marxist ideology where the working class is antagonised by elitist attempts to establish an essentialist approach to hegemony that is subsequently realised in a post-colonial era or neoliberalist and market-driven ideologies (see Žižek, 2008).
- 3.
For more detail about the occasion, see Un.org/un70/en.
- 4.
The word count for President Putin for English translation is provided by the office of Russian Presidency available from Kremlin.ru. It was used as the main source for illustrating metaphorical expressions of populism in this chapter. Despite this, both the original and translated formats were analysed for metaphor use . Their comparison showed that most of the conceptual metaphors in terms of their transfer schemes (Target As Source) were consistent across the two languages.
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Mussolf’s (2016) scenario approach to metaphor refers to the contextualised metaphor use (i.e. discourse approach) that is systematically recurrent throughout the data.
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- 8.
The referendum vote held on March 16, 2014 where the local populations of Crimea were requested whether they wanted to join Russia as a federal subject. The referendum was regarded as illegitimate by most members of the EU, the United States and Canada.
- 9.
The Strength metaphor should also be viewed here as a constituent part of the conservative/Strict Father Morality system, where strength is viewed as a crucial component of discipline, especially in self -defence (for more on this see Lakoff, 1996).
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Arcimavičienė, L. (2019). Self and Other Metaphors as Facilitating Features of Populist Style in Diplomatic Discourse: A Case Study of Obama and Putin’s Speeches. In: Macaulay, M. (eds) Populist Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97388-3_4
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