Metaphors in political communication: A case study of the use of deliberate metaphors in non-institutional political interviews

This article analyses the use of (deliberate) metaphors in political discourse pro-duced by French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians during non-insti-tutional political interviews. The article first investigates if the use of deliberate metaphor limits itself to a particular type of political discourse (i.e. public and institutional political discourse) or if metaphor use is also found in other types of settings (i.e. non-institutional political discourse). Second, the article analyses the variation of deliberate metaphor use between political actors depending on gender, seniority and political affiliation. To this end, the article applies Steen’s (2008) three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis on biographical interviews conducted with French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians (RMPs). Our results indicate that RMPs, when using non-deliberate metaphors, mostly rely on source domains such as construction, battle and relation-ships. This is in contrast with the use of deliberate metaphors, where source domains like sports, nature and container take the upper hand.