Identity and Force Critical Metaphors in Lewis Capaldi’s Songs Bruises and Someone You Loved

Abstract

Abstract: Identity is what a person or a group is. Force is violence or strong influence. A critical metaphor is the linguistic, conceptual and pragmatic characterization of metaphorical language from the triple perspective of metafunctions, conceptual metaphors and tools borrowed from Critical Discourse Analysis. The corpus consists of two song lyrics from Lewis Capaldi’s repertoire. The data are the metaphorical language related to force and they are in bold. The metaphorical language was analyzed at the linguistic, conceptual and pragmatic levels. The discussion that follows shows that the metaphorical language in Lewis Capaldi’s songs Bruises and Someone You Loved is a vehicle through which the singer expresses his identity. Keywords: critical, force, identity, metaphors, song.