The conceptual metaphors in German and Brazilian parliamentary speeches

This article presents partial results of an ongoing doctoral research, in which metaphors on the topic of "immigration" occurring in parliamentary speeches from Germany and Brazil in 2018 are identified and analyzed. Our aim is to find out which metaphors occur in these speeches and which factors, if any, make them more or less influential in political polarization. To do so, this research is based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. The lexical items “migrante”, “imigrante”, “refugiado”, “Migrant” and “Flüchtling” were searched in the transcripts of the meetings of the German Parliament and the Brazilian House of Representatives with the aid of the AntConc’s concordance tool to identify metaphorical patterns. Then, we analyzed the metaphors based on Critical Discourse Analysis. The results reveal that conceptual metaphors contribute to create the division between in- and outgroup, which is characteristic of polarization.