Metaphor and Persuasion in Strategic Communication

Sustainable Perspectives

Federica Ferrari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351743174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This groundbreaking work adopts an alternative metaphor-based approach to challenge, unpack, and redefine our understanding of persuasion and strategic communication and the extents to which they shape political discourse. The book's theoretical and methodological grounding in metaphor allows for an alternative perspective on strategic communication but also a robust discussion of both persuasion and other kinds of related discursive processes at work in political communication, including narrative, identification, and ideology. The volume integrates case studies from prominent political discourses, including those of George W. Bush, Jr., Tony Blair, and Barack Obama, to highlight the crucial role of persuasion management and sustainability in the public sphere and the ways in which it might inform political action and change in a positive way. Broadening our perception of the possibilities of persuasion and strategic communication, this dynamic volume is key reading for students and scholars in communication studies, political science, rhetoric, and cognitive linguistics.

1 ‘Words are Killers,’ alias Metaphor and Persuasion

Notwithstanding how hard they are to be followed practically, charming and promising paths rarely fail to be challenging.

The theoretical premises that I am going to set out in the course of this chapter justify the choice of metaphor as a crucial analytical tool for addressing persuasion in political discourse. A main reference is made here to the notion of “conceptual metaphor,” as it has been developed by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and other researchers coming from the cognitive approach, including Reddy, Gibbs, Kövecses, Steen and Semino.

From a theoretical perspective encompassing a bi-univocal relationship between language and culture, discourse and ideology, as well as argumentative structure and system of thought, not only are the cultural values “consistent with the metaphorical system” (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003: 23) but also “conceptual metaphor,” operating at a cognitive level, can be a means for structuring the culture. As a consequence, the potential power of metaphor with respect to persuasion follows.

From a linguistic perspective, this means that metaphor may be considered as both an object and a tool for textual and discourse analysis. Nonetheless, the dialectics between the cognitive and the linguistic features of the metaphor on the one hand render it a promising methodological tool, and on the other it informs its problematic application. Inevitably questionable is indeed working through a supposed-to-be nonlinguistic item within a textual horizon.

In collocating the notion of conceptual metaphor theoretically, this chapter aims to show the power of “conceptual metaphor” for addressing persuasion in discourse. Its use is fostered and its definitional basis and applicability will be questioned and discussed with respect to language-oriented theoretical approaches and text analysis constraints.

Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics: Charm of the Lakoffian¹ Perspective

Among the most notable contributions to the success of the cognitive model of metaphor is undoubtedly George Lakoff, arguably the person most responsible for a revaluation of metaphor in a broader cognitive sense. The scientific contribution of the Lakoffian theory leads metaphor well beyond the borders of rhetoric, linguistics and philosophy to become an object of interest and of application in various other fields, such as psychology, neuroscience and politics. And yet, the originality of Lakoff’s work with respect to such a long-standing object of study has to be considered above all in the light of his capacity to recombine and develop the starting points offered by 20th century rhetoric in a systematic way. A pair of relevant examples to take into account in this sense are Richards (1936) for the tenor and vehicle theory and Black (1962) for the interactional feature of metaphor.

Also to be acknowledged is Kenneth Burke, for his precursory intuitions on motivation in language and communication (1958, 1969a, 1969b, 1984), and on metaphor and perspective (1941, 1984). His general account of the mind as a protagonist of language and human communication anticipates Lakoff’s approach to metaphor, and language, as primarily conceptual. “If mind as the creator and generator of experience is to be treated as more than an accidental intruder in the realm of matter, then we must demonstrate the way in which the mind functions in communication” (Burke, 1984: xvi). More specifically, this also drives to the symbolic mystification of reality within the complexity of communication phenomena:

“Only angels communicate absolutely.” For better or worse, the human condition is a condition of imperfect communication, and we solve our problems in society as best we can through recalcitrant and mystifying symbols that cause the problems we must yet solve if we are to act together as all. Thus, symbols are both blessing and curse – a blessing if we turn our study of their use into a method of social control, a curse if we let their power overwhelm us until we accept symbolic mystification of reality.

(1984: xvii)

In this sense, in Burke’s work metaphor is able to confer an alternative perspective on thoughts:

Indeed, the metaphor always has about it precisely this revealing of hitherto unsuspected connectives which we may note in the progressions of a dream. It appeals by exemplifying relationship between objects which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored.

(1984: 90)

All the more, the “frank metaphor,” thanks to its capability to “stick to the concrete,” acquires the function of allowing theoretical or philosophical connections which would not have been possible without it:

In order to get around this almost universal tendency to confuse abstractions with facts”, Mrs. Stephen writes, “Bergson sometimes tries to get us to see the facts as they actually are using metaphor instead of description in terms of abstract general notions.[…]

Qualities and all abstract general norms are, indeed, nothing but marks of analogies between a given fact and all the other facts belonging to the same class: they may mark rather closer analogies than those brought out by an ordinary metaphor, but on the other hand in a frank metaphor we at least stick to the concrete, we substitute fact for fact and we are in no danger of confusing the fact introduced with the actual fact to which the metaphor applies.

(1984: 94–95)

Burke’s conception of metaphor as perspective, capable of dealing with the “incongruity” (1984: 89; 1941: 421, 423), anticipates much of the potential of metaphor which has been developed by the Lakoffian school and is still to be explored (Ferrari, forthcoming). And yet, in Burke’s philosophy, though evaluated well beyond its traditional scope, metaphor comes along together with other three “master tropes” such as “metonymy,” “synecdoche” and “irony,” respectively standing for the conceptual mechanisms of “reduction,” “representation” and “dialectic” (1941: 422). This means that metaphor does not acquire the prominent position it will be given in the cognitive reformulation, where it includes metonymy, and synecdoche alike, not even mentioned as a specific figure (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003: 35–40). “Metaphor,” “synecdoche” and “metonymy” are already considered as “overlapping” in Burke (1941: 426), where metonymy is treated as “a special application of synecdoche” (1941: 428). In Lakoff, their relationship is instead reversed with a primary focus on metaphor. Metaphor subsumes metonymy, which in turn comprehends also synecdoche, considered instead as “a special case of metonymy” ([1980]2003: 36). The relationship among the four master tropes of Burke can be clarified just by re-reading them from a conceptual perspective. Burke defines metaphor as a “device for seeing something in terms of something else” (1941: 421), which, of course, is “to use B [that something else] as a perspective upon A [something]” (1941: 422). Let us now focus on the relational process of transference between two ‘things.’ Such two things can be external to one another, as in the case of the metaphor, allowing a different perspective, or one can be internal to the other, as in the case of synecdoche and metonymy – no matter whether one is a special case of the other here. In this latter case, they allow for representation and reduction, to use Burke’s terminology. When the two things from concepts become discoursal and dialectical items, the metaphorical mechanism can preside even over irony, which “arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms” (1941: 432). All the four tropes are characterized by an interaction, or relation between two “things,” giving rise to a third, different “thing” or development of status, be it in point of view, conceptual organization, or dialectical action, and (expected) reaction. The transferential functioning of the metaphor comes out as the main organizing mechanism for all the tropes. The relational process suggested by the metaphor, meant as perspective, was already a motive to choose it as favorite among the others: perspective sounded as more promising a relation due to its dynamism and capability of promoting change. The omnicomprehensive status which metaphor gains as transfer device, following the reading of Burke in conceptual perspective, functioned as an ulterior justification. And yet, it is not until Lakoff’s reformulation that the metaphorical functioning can be seen as presiding over, if not subsuming the other ‘figures,’ to the point of transcending its rhetorical limits. In Lakoff, metaphor comes out of its traditional conception of “trope” to become a device of our mind, and the main one.

Beyond this systematization of the most productive contributions of the 20th century, the originality of “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” (Lakoff, 1993) seems to lay in the reassessment of the status of metaphor, from figure of speech (tropus) to condicio sine qua non of the thought. “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003: 3). This has been a revolutionary change in perspective with respect to the previous metaphor studies. All the more, according to Lakoff, this position implies an overthrow of theory of meaning and “experiential gestalt” ([1980]2003: xi). The shift is from objectivist realism to subjective relativism parameters. In this sense, Lakoff distances himself from all that falls within that tradition that Johnson (1981) unifies under the aegis of the “literal-truth paradigm.” This paradigm is built on three common assumptions: first, that “the human conceptual system is essentially literal”; second, that metaphor is “a deviant use of words in other than their proper senses, which accounts for its tendency to confuse and to deceive”; and third, that “the meaning and truth claims of metaphor (if there are any) are just those of literal paraphrase” (1981: 9). This radical change of perspective leads to conceive metaphor as an “inescapable device” (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003: 10) and destroys the critique of that stream of metaphor detractors who, continuing the tradition inaugurated by Hobbes and Locke ([1980]2003: 190–1), consider metaphor as a potential means of “dece[ption]” (Johnson, 1981: 11–12). Such a theoretical position, shared by several exponents within the debate on metaphor theory, even close to Lakoff and Johnson – Cohen (1979), Cooper (1986), Bertau (1996), Goatly (1997), Müller-Richter (1998) and Leezenberg (2001) – indeed calls into question the possibility of a form of communication without metaphor. Such a situation is in fact absolutely denied by Lakoff: “Metaphorical thought, in itself, is neither good nor bad; it is simply commonplace and inescapable” (1992: 463). In this sense, Lakoff himself underlines the danger of metaphor as a persuasive device, but not as a deviant rhetorical instrument. The mis-en-garde vis-à-vis the metaphor is even stronger in spite of, or maybe thanks to, its revaluation.

Admittedly, the way Lakoff poses and develops the question of metaphor has long fascinated me because of some theoretical aspects of its definition itself. In my view, the most interesting traits of the Lakoffian position and of his definition of metaphor are the omnicomprehensivity intrinsic in the systematicity of the Lakoffian ‘metaphorology,’ the tension between motivation versus arbitrariness of language and the experiential dimension, with its characteristics of embodiment and emotionality (Lakoff, 1993). Moreover, metaphor in such as a cognitive instrument at the basis of thought and action (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003) is promising as a potential means of conceptual reformulation, ideological redefinition and political reproposition. This aspect of ‘creativity’ contributes to determining its charm besides its potentiality and its “transformativity” in persuasion. And yet, the reasons why I have delved into Lakoffian conceptual metaphor have to be attributed to the results expected from an application of metaphor as an analytical tool: metaphor is apt to transcend strictly textual borders.

As it is defined by Lakoff, metaphor is a constitutive element of the conceptual system, put at the basis of language and reasoning and motivated on an experiential basis. The characteristics of synthesis, hierarchy, dualism and systematicity maximize its application possibilities while guaranteeing the internal coherence of the metaphors informing a given culture as interrelated within a given cultural system (Lakoff, 1993, [1980]2003). Rendering something abstract or intangible into something concrete already makes metaphor potentially persuasive: its chances of getting in touch with the addressee’s sensory channels are great if for no other reason than the fact it refers to domains of experience that can be ‘seen,’ ‘touched’ and experienced. The emotive bias inherent in its peculiar capability of imaging projection (Lakoff, 2004) also presides over its persuasive potential, determining its pivotal role within argumentation.

Moreover, as I will show, metaphor turns out to be a “commonplace,” “inescapable” (Lakoff, 1992: 463) and “systematic” (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003: 7–9) phenomenon of our conceptual system, crucial with respect to both what we define ‘real’ and the comprehension of the ‘real,’ as well as for speech production and reception. More specifically, the “partial” nature of the “metaphorical structuring” (Lakoff and Johnson, [1980]2003: 13) would also preside over its persuasive (and ‘transformative’) power and its dangerousness, above all in consideration of its effects on social and political action. As imaging device, metaphor is also informed by a high emotional component. Beyond being crucial for defining reality, metaphor also constitutes a means for evoking emotive reactions in the audience, especially through imaging projection (Lakoff, 2004). These features together determine metaphor’s persuasive effectiveness and make it crucial in argumentation and strategic communication.

Therefore, a metaphor-based analysis of a given political discourse can be revealing with respect to its inherent representation of ‘reality,’ ideological structure and persuasive strategy. And yet, the Lakoffian ‘metaphorology’ is not without questionable aspects. Its claims of omnicomprehensivity and motivation, in respect to the dimensions of both language and ‘reality,’ open up a series of theoretical consequences, which are not to be underestimated, all the more so in regards to a practical application of metaphor as a tool of textual analysis.

Starting from the Lakoffian definition of conceptual metaphor, I will focus on some of its main characteristics and theoretical implications, so to strengthen its integrated nature, transformativity and persuasive potential. I will delve into some theoretical nodes revolving around the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in the Lakoffian ‘metaphorology,’ the relationship between metaphor and language, as well as its persuasive potential in regard to political action. This is where metaphor becomes strategic. Such a discussion has a pivotal role for examining the sustainability of a metaphor-based linguistic analysis, the Lakoffian model and the text-constrained variations in the methodological proposal presented here (Chapters 2 and 3).

Integrated Conceptual Metaphor: Toward a Definition

Lakoff and Johnson’s work Metaphors We Live By inaugurates a path of studies which provocatively entered the philosophical and linguistic debate of the last twenty years. Many are the practical cues, and in diverse fields of application. And yet there are many theoretical and methodological issues to be faced. According to Lakoff and Johnson:

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

([1980]2003: 5)

From here a cognitive (“understanding”), experiential (“experiencing”) and interactive (“one kind of thing in terms of another”) conception of metaphor emerges. Metaphor as a process has then to do with understanding and experience; it involves both reasoning and emotion, thought and action, mind and body (Lakoff, 1987, 1993, [1980]2003). The scope metaphor comes to acquire in the Lakoffian perspective transcends by far the borders which it has been attributed for centuries by the philosophical and literary tradition. It does not just coincide with a mere figure of speech, but would constitute the fundamental processor of language, hereby concerning our conceptual system itself. Lakoff writes:

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

([1980]2003: 3)

From here it follows that the Lakoffian metaphor comes to be defined as “conceptual” (Lakoff, 1993: 206). By “conceptual,” I mean here ‘integrated,’ that is, having to do with thought, emotions and body alike, and therefore informing action. Metaphor in such as conceptual is therefore ‘three dimensional’ (MIND/EMOTIONS/BODY) and presides over how and what we think, feel and act. As we will see in the following paragraphs, integration is fundamental for the transformational power of metaphor and for persuasion.

This conception of metaphor is evidently to be collocated in a theoretical panorama distancing itself from both positions revolving around objective-truth (Saul Kripke, Richard Montague) and denotative linguistic theories (Donald Davidson). It is exactly within this panorama that what is nowadays known as the “cognitive linguistic view of metaphor” (Kövecses, 2002: viii), starting from Lakoff and Johnson ([1980]2003), turns out to be constituted – constituted with all its characteristics of a comprehensive, generalized and empirically tested theory (Kövecses, 2002: x).

In “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” (1993), Lakoff presents his notion of metaphor first of all in opposition to that conception which has been constituted and affirmed as “definitional” in the “classical theories” on language from Aristotle onwards (Lakoff, 1993: 202). Despite the diversity of the theoretical contributions in that canon, in those theories that Lakoff defines as classical, metaphor is commonly conceived as “a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its conventional meaning to express a ‘similar’ concept” (Lakoff, 1993: 202). Moreover, according to this very definition, the metaphor turns out to fall within the field of tropes or poetic figures. In other words, notwithstanding the “great value” and the practical purposes Aristotle attributes to it even in prose in his Art of Rhetoric (2012: 161), its definitional conception, as set out in his Poetics (2013), remains primarily aesthetic.²

What distinguishes the Lakoffian from the “classical” conception (1993: 202) is first of all what I consider a bi-directional ‘extension’ of the metaphor on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Persuasion and Sustainability: The Post-9/11 Arena
• 1 ‘Words are Killers,’ alias Metaphor and Persuasion
• 2 Persuasion Analysis: Introducing a Framework for Detecting Persuasion in Discourse
• 3 The Four-step Persuasion-oriented Procedure for the Identification of Strategic Metaphor in Text
• 4 Quantitative and Preliminary Analysis I/II: Hypothesizing Rhetorical Attitudes in Discourse
• 5 Qualitative Textual Analysis II – Detecting Frames in Persuasion Building: The Contemporary Rhetoric of Conflict
• 6 Qualitative Metaphor Analysis III – from Microtext to Macrotext: The Strategy of Fear
• 7 Contrastive Analysis: Conflict vs. Inclusive Logic and Political Change
• 8 Toward an Integrated Redefinition of Metaphor and Persuasion in Strategic Communication – ‘Transformational’ Power and Sustainable Perspectives
• References
• Index