Cross-cultural variation in the metaphorical framing of CORRUPTION in Nigerian political discourse

Godswill Uchechukwu Chigbu

Research output: Unpublished conference presentation (presented paper, abstract, poster)AbstractAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

According to Kovesces (2005), conceptual metaphors vary cross-culturally as "natural and obvious (emphasis is mine) as the variation of metaphors at the level of metaphorical linguistic expressions" (p. 67). In this paper, I explore the extent to which this is true in two distinct sub-cultures: the autocratic culture of military governments and the democratic culture of civilian governments. I do this by examining two regime-cultures that have formed the political history of Nigeria between 1960–67 and 1970–date. Corruption has remained an archetypal agenda in these regime-cultures. Accordingly, it would be expected to see a variation in the metaphorical framing of corruption across the corpora of the civilian and military governments in Nigerian political discourse (henceforth, NPD). There is, however, little or no empirical substantiation of this expected variation by culture in NPD. What we have as existing studies on metaphor in NPD (e.g., Taiwo, 2013) have primarily focused on the analysis of framing functions in contemporary presidential speeches. Also, most research inputs on metaphors of corruption (e.g., Negro, 2015) lack methodological rigour. Nonetheless, they have shown that CORRUPTION can be framed differently based on regional dimensions. The possibility of corruption varying across regime cultures, however, has remained underrepresented in literature. In sum, both strands of research are biased toward the synchronic variation of metaphors. Therefore, this study aims to identify the source domains used in framing CORRUPTION and how the source domains vary across regime cultures and reflect cultural models in the NPD. The corpus of the study, with a size of 500,921 words, is divided into two corpora, namely a civilian corpus and a military corpus. Both are speeches given by elected presidents and military heads of state between 1970 and 2022. We followed Stefanowitsch’s (2006) Metaphor Pattern Analysis to identify keywords based on previous literature. Furthermore, we adopted Steen et al.’s (2010) MIPVU for metaphor identification and Ahrens and Jiang's (2020) for source-domain verification. A pilot study indicates that corruption metaphors in the autocratic regime-culture fall into three conceptual categories, thus: CORRUPTION IS SEDUCTION, ANTICORRUPTION IS FARMING, and ANTICORRUPTION IS A CURE. Whereas, in the democratic regime-culture, they fall into five categories: CORRUPTION IS A LIVING ORGANISM; CORRUPTION IS A DISEASE; CORRUPTION IS AN ACID; and CORRUPTION IS A POISON. This demonstrates a variation in the metaphorical framing of corruption, and the variation, following Cultural Model Theory, reflects the cultural schemas of the distinct discourse communities….
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusNot published / presented only - Jun 2023
EventRaAM16: Metaphor in Public Discourse - Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Duration: 28 Jun 202330 Jun 2023

Conference

ConferenceRaAM16: Metaphor in Public Discourse
Country/TerritorySpain
Period28/06/2330/06/23

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Cross-cultural variation in the metaphorical framing of CORRUPTION in Nigerian political discourse'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this