Argomentazione metaforica in un corpus di assemblee politiche/Metaphorical argumentation in a political assemblies corpus

Abstract

How do metaphors work when their chief function is an argumentative and persuasive one? Building on a previous corpus study of the memoranda of an Italian council of foreigners, this paper aims to demonstrate how metaphors function when different ideological perspectives face each other in a single communicative space over a series of gatherings, studying them from various points of view (linguistic, conceptual, textual, pragmatic and enunciative), adopting a corpus approach with the support of blending theory. The role of metaphors in such cases is twofold. Political perspectives confront one another precisely through metaphors: as a result, metaphors interact not only at a textual level, as predictable, but also systematically, through multiple meetings over the years. Secondly, even though metaphors betray different perspectives, they also unexpectedly reveal a common element: metaphors semantically incorporate the speakers’ social and communicative identity. Thus, they play a crucial communicative and argumentative role, as this identity forms a “fence of consensus”, a common cluster of values between members of a group (irrespective of their different political perspectives), not necessarily shared by those outside the group. In sum, metaphors cover important rhetorical and conceptual functions, and their interaction results in complex argumentative strategies. In addition, these systematical phenomena confirm the importance of a corpus approach in metaphor research