From Metaphors to Scenes: Mariano Rajoy’s Presidential Inauguration Speech

Abstract

The international economic crisis through which the central European countries are passing has been related, in the last years, to a strong critique on the policies and actions of the governments. In this context, the investiture of Mariano Rajoy and the change of the political flavour in Spain implied the possibility of a new orientation of the administration. His inauguration speech projected it in this way at least. In this paper, some of the main conceptual metaphors of that speech are analysed, paying special attention to structural and orientational metaphors used to observe how the construction of the political speaker is legitimated. To achieve this, we will propose some relationships between Lakoff and Johnson’s experiential perspective with the notion of convalidated scenes and the different components of the political discourse that come from discourse analysis.Key words: Conceptual metaphors, discourse analysis, political speaker, convalidated scenes.