The political metaphor: from expressive values to persuasive virtues

Abstract

A particular form of interference, with indirectly transferred effects and communicative values, the political metaphor essentially mirrors the issuer's effort towards evading and mystifying the political reality. Intensively used in the contemporary political discourse, the political metaphor loses the virtues of the poetical metaphor becoming rather laborious and vulgar, in the etymological sense of the term. The political discourse mainly exploits the quality of the metaphor to operate transfers from the complex to the simple, from the abstract to the concrete, conferring a strong subjective dimension to political communication. As well as this, we emphasize the polemic character of metaphorical constructions in the contemporary political discourse and their role in discrediting political adversaries. Defining the political metaphor in terms of interaction and transaction between contexts brings forward the semantic potential of metaphoric expressions and consequently, their impact upon the reception level. This study proposes a presentation of the main persuasive virtues that the metaphor acquires within political communication, by analysing the addresses held in the plenum of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies in May-June 2015.