The process en route: the metaphor of the journey as the dominant narrative for the political discourse in Catalonia

Identifier:  imarina:5132520

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/imarina5132520

Authors:  Moragas-Fernandez, Carlota M; Montagut Calvo, Marta; Capdevila Gomez, Arantxa

Abstract:
Political actors use metaphor in their speeches in order to frame political issues [Charteris-Black, J. (2011). Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan]. If they succeed in imposing a particular (metaphorical) frame, especially when there is no agreement on the definition of certain political issues, this can become the prevailing way for referring to that issue [Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]. In this research, we argue that this was the case for the metaphor of the JOURNEY in the Catalan political conflict during electoral periods. To that end we use Critical Metaphor Analysis [Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan] to analyse televised campaign ads from the last three elections for the Parliament of Catalonia - from 2010, 2012, and 2015 - in order to identify how political actors' use metaphors to talk about the Catalan political situation during these years and to verify if JOURNEY metaphor resulted into the dominant narrative. The results show that the political situation has been conceptualized in terms of a 'process en route,' although the narratives generated by the political actors that shaped that discourse differ.