Linguistic Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in English and Kurdish Political Speeches
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21271/zjhs.27.4.22Keywords:
metaphor, conceptual metaphor, MIP(VU), syntactic analysis, language programmingAbstract
This paper provides a linguistic analysis of conceptual metaphors in English and Kurdish political speeches. Simply put, metaphor is understanding something in terms of another, to find correspondence between two different semantic domains. The data is collected from presidential speeches given between the years 2005 to 2022. In total, there are 16 speeches selected, eight speeches for each language, encompassing 32305 words for English speeches and 17932 words for Kurdish. In the first step, the lexical units were recognized and after that, metaphors are highlighted in the speeches based on Metaphor Identification Procedure (Vrije Universiteit) (MIP(VU)). After identifying linguistic metaphors, distinct characteristics, especially syntactic, of each unit, it appears there can be syntactic patterns for a big number of words when occur in political speeches; some words appear to be always linking verb; metaphoricity of some verbs depends on the transitivity of the verb; some words appear to be always metaphorical in political discourse but not in another register. With these syntactic characteristics designed as codes, it becomes easy to build software through language programming to identify metaphors mechanically.
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