Competition metaphors and ideology

It is now well accepted that metaphors perform a range of rhetorical purposes in political genres that are broadly associated with persuasion. ¹ The choice of metaphor is governed by the political context and the nature of the genre, since debates, conference speeches and social media platforms differ in their rhetorical needs. Such metaphors influence public events by reinforcing and legitimising the outlooks and beliefs of supporters and by attacking and delegitimising those of opponents. In either case, where there is evidence of the realisation of a predetermined strategy I have proposed the term ‘purposeful metaphor’ and argued that there is often corroborating linguistic and contextual evidence of this purpose (Charteris-Black 2012). Linguistic evidence of purpose is often provided by semantically related metaphor clusters. For example, words from the semantic fields of war, illness, journeys or the human body may refer to political struggle, opponents, political actions or the state of the nation, respectively. Reiteration of metaphors encourages ways of thinking about the entity referred to, and contributes to, conceptually based outlooks. The rhetorical context supplies the identity of a nation or social group, or the nature of a social problem. Clusters of cognitively related metaphors are typically represented using conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Another form of contextual evidence of purpose is when metaphors contribute to a wider discourse in public debates, in which the metaphors of one group are contested by the alternative ones proposed by an opposing group. Metaphors are purposeful when they contribute to a speaker's efforts to convince others that he or she is right.