Metaphors of culpability and commendation in selected political campaign speeches of Buhari

Abstract

Politics permeates every facet of human life as most human relationships have a political undertone either directly or indirectly. In an attempt to win the heart of the citizens, politicians employ different means, and the use of metaphorical expressions is one of those methods. This paper examines the use of conceptual metaphor as employed by political actors in Nigeria to convince listeners or their audience about the political actors’ perspectives and performances in the political space of the country and condemn the perspectives and performances of their political rivals, especially those from other political parties. The paper makes use of conceptual metaphor theory as the analytical theory for the study. Their approach explores metaphor as a cognitive instrument to reveal how language users connect two different fields to convey and understand ideas better or more effectively by mapping both the source and target domains to each other. Using the purposive sampling technique, three campaign speeches delivered by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, 2018, and 2019 were used as data for the paper. In the analysis, the paper found that Mr. Buhari used conceptual metaphors like BAD GOVERNMENT IS A WEAK FOUNDATION GOOD GOVERNMENT IS SOLID FOUNDATION, CORRUPTION IS A KILLER, GOOD GOVERNMENT IS A BRIDGE, GOOD GOVERNMENT IS A LIBERATOR, etc. These conceptual metaphors are employed by Mr. Buhari to submit that the political opponents are culpable while his own party is commendable. The study concludes that the use of conceptual metaphor goes a long way in situating a political party positively in the minds of electorates. Therefore, scholars in the field of political discourse and/or political science should incorporate the teaching of conceptual metaphor in their curriculum.

Keywords

• conceptual metaphor
• culpability
• commendation
• mapping
• Nigeria
• political campaign