Populist discourse and active metaphors in the 2016 US presidential elections

IF 1.8 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Intercultural Pragmatics Pub Date : 2021-08-30 DOI:10.1515/ip-2021-4004

J. Keating

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引用次数: 5

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, the specter of populism has grown increasingly restless in the Western world and beyond. This new populism has been observed in different political movements in Europe; the Brexit movement in the UK, Podemos and Vox in Spain, Rassemblement National in France, Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, and Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary. Inevitably, it is most commonly associated with the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA in 2016. In this paper, a pragmatic interaction theory of metaphorical utterances is applied to a corpus of speeches given by candidates during the American 2016 presidential elections. First, speeches and candidates were graded for populism according to a holistic grading method. Secondly, speeches were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate if and how active metaphorical language was used to construct the populist frame. The findings suggest that active metaphors can be useful for politicians who wish to counter the dominant conventional frames, and so can serve the ideological purposes of populists and non-populists alike. Therefore, this paper also argues that novel metaphorical concepts and active metaphorical utterances make important contributions to the communication of ideologies in political discourse and should not be overlooked by analysts.

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2016年美国总统大选中的民粹主义话语与积极隐喻

近年来，民粹主义的幽灵在西方世界及其他地区愈演愈烈。这种新的民粹主义在欧洲不同的政治运动中都有所体现;英国的脱欧运动、西班牙的Podemos和Vox、法国的国民大议会(Rassemblement National)、荷兰的自由人民党(Partij voor de Vrijheid)，以及匈牙利维克多Orbán的非自由民主。不可避免地，它最常与2016年唐纳德·特朗普当选美国总统联系在一起。本文将隐喻话语的语用互动理论应用于2016年美国总统大选候选人的演讲语料库。首先，根据整体评分法，对演讲和候选人进行民粹主义评分。其次，采用定量和定性的方法对演讲进行分析，以调查是否以及如何使用主动隐喻语言来构建民粹主义框架。研究结果表明，主动隐喻对于那些希望对抗占主导地位的传统框架的政治家来说是有用的，因此可以服务于民粹主义者和非民粹主义者的意识形态目的。因此，本文还认为，新的隐喻概念和主动的隐喻话语对政治话语中的意识形态传播做出了重要贡献，这是分析人士不可忽视的。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Intercultural Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.10

自引率

36.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： Intercultural Pragmatics is a fully peer-reviewed forum for theoretical and applied pragmatics research. The goal of the journal is to promote the development and understanding of pragmatic theory and intercultural competence by publishing research that focuses on general theoretical issues, more than one language and culture, or varieties of one language. Intercultural Pragmatics encourages ‘interculturality’ both within the discipline and in pragmatic research. It supports interaction and scholarly debate between researchers representing different subfields of pragmatics including the linguistic, cognitive, social, and interlanguage paradigms. The intercultural perspective is relevant not only to each line of research within pragmatics but also extends to several other disciplines such as anthropology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology, communication, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and bi- and multilingualism. Intercultural Pragmatics makes a special effort to cross disciplinary boundaries. What we primarily look for is innovative approaches and ideas that do not always fit into existing paradigms, and lead to new ways of thinking about language. Intercultural Pragmatics has always encouraged the publication of theoretical papers including linguistic and philosophical pragmatics that are very important for research in intercultural pragmatics.