The Persuasive Model of Metaphor in the Socio-Political Discourse: Alteration, Suggestion and Consolidation of Socio-Political Perspectives

It has been a few decades since the first contemporary studies about “metaphor” were carried out, and the conceptual metaphor has a special position within the different literary theories, constantly incorporating new perspectives into metaphor research in conjunction with the other fields of study. Based on the theory of cognitive metaphor, metaphors exist everywhere and essentially,it is the metaphorical structures, which affect the people’s understanding. Therefore, we encounter different questions, which include, “what’s the nature of the addressee’s relations with metaphor?”, “can metaphor be effective in persuading the people to accept or reject a certain imposed attitude?”, “which variables can increase or decrease the persuasive impact of metaphor, and what should be the features of each of these variables?” Therefore, the present essay is aimed at looking into metaphors from the view of these questions and introducing the persuasive variables of metaphor in the format of an organized model. To this end, the present study capitalizes on the literature as the theoretical backing of the model and presents the persuasive metaphor model based on Hovland’s persuasion model, exploring its variable characteristics in terms of a theoretical framework in accordance with the results of the previously done research studies. Therefore, inspired by the four variables of McGuire, Wood and Eagly, five variables have been put forward and the theoretical features of each of them have been investigated in line with the characteristics of metaphorical relationship for the persuasive communications of metaphor.These variables include a) metaphor-sender, b) metaphor-receiver, c) metaphorical structure (made of the source domain and target domain), d) communicative conduit and e) texture (location, time, etc.). In addition, we have also analyzed the interactions and exchanges of metaphor with other rhetorical strategies.