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Abstract
Given the centrality of bodily experience to cognitive theory and to the notion of conceptual metaphor, gender turns out to be a possible category of research for a culturally oriented cognitive-based linguistic analysis of persuasion in political discourse. More specifically, conceptual metaphor, for its very characteristic of embodiment, is intrinsically interesting because of issues of both gender perception and representation. The relation between metaphor and gender becomes particularly productive owing to what Lakoff defines ‘idealized cognitive models’. From this point of view, it could be interesting to observe how gender notions could not only inform complex systems of metaphors, as common sources in mappings, but also open up new analytical perspectives to address the matter of persuasion in discourse. In this latter sense ‘Woman’ vs. ‘Man’ may turn out to be useful categories for placing both the argumentative foundation of a discourse and the persuasive mode of appealing its audience. Focusing on contemporary American political discourse, this paper develops possible ways of analysing G. W. Bush Jr.'s ‘preventive war’ persuasion strategy through the category of gender.
Notes
1. See Ferrari (Citation2007a).
2. In as much as human beings are both biologically and imaginatively defined in terms of gender, we assume the audience – as it is constituted by human beings – to be forcedly gender informed. In other words, as Bynum (Citation1986) pointed out all human beings are ‘gendered’ (1986, 2).
3. An operational account of gender as structural category has also been acknowledged in intercultural perspective as in Yegenouglu explanation of the Western reading of Orientalism: ‘The Orientalism, seen as the embodiment of sensuality, is always understood in feminine terms and accordingly its place in Western imagery has been constructed through the simultaneous gesture of racialization and femininization’ (Citation1998, 73).
4. An extensive study on the problem of gender beyond the sexual categorization is offered by Layton (Citation1998).
5. For an insightful argumentation on the reasons why the Western is to be regarded as crucial in constructing and reinforcing national identity (see Silver Citation2003).
6. For a better understanding of the procedure of textual analysis we make reference to, see also (Ferrari Citation2007a, Citation2007b).
7. They are, respectively, responsible for exploring the importance and role of emotive dimensions in communication and developing a promising sociocultural framework for the characterization of emotion within discourse practice.
8. Walton (Citation1992) deals with the status of appeals to emotion in persuasion, taking into consideration some examples of informal logic from an exploratory overview of those types of arguments which have been traditionally treated as ‘fallacies’.
9. And in this sense, the metaphor chosen to express a given emotion is far from being without consequences from the point of view of persuasion.
10. These may then turn out to be a consequence of the conceptual implications or be directly conjured up, depending on the nature of the metaphor at work and on the co-text contribution. A given metaphorical expression within a certain argumentative structure may directly produce emotive reactions. This is, for example, the case of ‘image metaphors’, that is ‘one-shot’ metaphors, mapping ‘only one image onto one other image’ (Lakoff Citation1993, 229). It is clear that for these metaphors there is almost no need of conceptual implications for an emotion to be evoked.
11. In fact, on the basis of the assumption that ‘[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (Lakoff and Johnson Citation2003 [1980], 3), not only does he conceive ‘our concepts [as metaphorically] structured’ but he also asserts that ‘conceptual structure is meaningful because it is embodied, that is, it arise from, and is tied to, our perceptual bodily experience’ (1987, 267). In other words, according to Lakoff (Citation1993), metaphor functions as a basic conceptual device because it is ‘grounded in experience’ (240).
12. Distancing herself from the ‘inherent’ approach, she goes beyond the cognitive perspective, attributing responsibility to sociocultural processes in affecting our bodily experience as related to emotions (1998, 32–33). According to Lupton (Citation1998) ‘our experiences of embodiment [have to be considered] as always being constructed through and mediated by sociocultural processes’ (32), and a major role has to be attributed to discourse as a sociocultural process. With respect to a cognitive position which considers ‘emotional concepts [as] clear examples of abstract concepts that have a grounding in bodily experience’ (Lakoff Citation1987, 377, also quoted by Lupton Citation1998, 36), Lupton's approach leaves more space for the responsibility of discourse as a sociocultural factor.
13. For an account of stereotypes operating in discoursal identity construction see for instance, Ladegaard (Citation2012).
14. The ‘Manichean frame’, as a particular radicalisation of the ‘conflict frame’, for its peculiarity and frequency in our corpus, may preside over a kind of novel metaphorical process specifically characterizing Bush's discourse. In a larger research project (see ‘Metaphor at Work: la strategia persuasive di G. W. Bush Jr.’, Ph.D. dissertation, unpublished manuscript), the Manichean has also been constructed as a macro-metaphor for a descriptive synthesis of results.
15. The ‘inferior’ ontological status attributed to what is made coincide with Evil (Good is Up vs. Bad/Evil is down) justifies a series of related implications primarily concerning the conceptual definition of ‘safety’ and ‘justice’, e.g. ‘performing lesser evils in the name of good is justified’ (Lakoff Citation2004).
16. For a more in-depth explanation of the persuasion strategy conducted via emotions see Ferrari (Citation2007a).
17. The relationship between narrative structure and political discourse can be further translated into the relationship between political discourse and action, and, more specifically between ‘rhetorical dispositions’ and ‘military strategies’, as it has been extensively developed in Park (Citation2012).
18. The ‘Bush Corpus’ consists of a corpus of G. W. Bush's speeches (176, 123,505 tokens), gathered over a period of 4 years, from January 2001 to January 2004 – and including what we have considered as three genre types: Inaugural Address and State of the Union speeches (SU), Addresses to the Nation (AN) and Radio Addresses (RA).
19. See Ferrari (Citation2007a).
20. In previous research, amongst the major characteristics of G. W. Bush style a certain ambivalence of the speaker between an external position, as an observer, and an internal experiential position has been acknowledged. This ambiguity in positioning himself as a speaker as in and out the audience plays a major role in allowing a double imaging projection for the president as both common citizen (one as the others, in the community) and hero (different from the others, out of the community in as much as out of the ordinary, exceptional).
21. Also see Ferrari (Citation2007b).
22. For a better explanation of the difference between ‘concept’ and ‘descent’ (see Warner Sollors Citation1986). Warner Sollors also gets part of his thesis from David Schneider (Citation1980).
23. For an exploratory overview of Manicheism see Puech (Citation1995).
