Metaphoric Representations of Electoral Events in Selected Nigerian Post-Election Speeches

Abstract

The discourse representation of elections indicates how political actors, the media and members of the public view elections. Previous studies on discourse representation of elections have focused on media construal of elections and the political actors who participated in them. The literature has not extensively explored how political actors represent elections. Hence, this study investigates politicians' metaphoric portraiture of elections, through lexical indexes, in selected Nigerian post-election speeches, with theoretical perspectives from Charteris-Black's Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) and Langacker's Theory of Domains (TD). The study finds out that Nigerian politicians metaphorically represent the general electoral processes with conceptual metaphors for the purpose of positive self-presentation and negative other-representation.

Keywords: Nigerian post-election speeches, lexical concepts, conceptual metaphors, source/target domains, electoral events