President Lula's metaphors in a corpus linguistic perspective: The case of 'development'

Abstract

One of the main linguistic phenomena in recent Brazilian politics is what the media has called ‘President Lula’s metaphors’. The starting point for the present investigation is that there must be lots of metaphors that go unnoticed in the president’s discourse and that these may be uncovered by corpus-based research. We looked at the presence of conceptual metaphors related to ‘development’ in a corpus of three years of official presidential speeches. The results indicated the systematic use of three metaphorical concepts that together define the notion of development for the head of State: JOURNEY, BUILDING and ORGANISM. These three concepts together equate development with a long process that is generated, planned and carried out by the government.