The Use of Conceptual Metaphors in Political Speeches by the Representatives of the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the European Union

This thesis discusses the use of English conceptual metaphors in political speeches, specifically focusing on the domains that are used in the policy-related speeches of the Council of the European Union (EU) during the Finnish Presidency term in 2019. Furthermore, the current study takes a cognitive linguistic approach, where political discourse is considered as a product of individual and collective mental processes. The cognitive account explains that metaphor is a part of the human conceptualisation system and not just a stylistic expression of oratory and literature. Moreover, it is thought that metaphor works as a mapping from well-understood source domains of experience to more abstract target domains of cultural knowledge. The four priorities of the Finnish presidency term (the rule of law, sustainable development, climate action, and security) serve as the topics of the analysis. Moreover, the data of this thesis consists of nine speech articles collected and preprocessed from the online publications of the Prime Minister’s Office using programming tools in Python. After pre-processing, the data was organised with a spreadsheet tool, for manual qualitative analysis. First, the metaphorical expressions were identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) followed by categorisation according to the two-domain mapping model, which is a key element of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980a). In other words, as the study aimed to describe how the use of metaphorical expressions contributes to the framing of statements made by Finnish government officials, metaphorical expressions were first identified at the individual level of the analysis. Then, following the bottom-up approach, the metaphorical expressions were categorised into the two-domain metaphor types on the supraindividual level. Lastly, the metaphors were further grouped together in relation to emotional and experiential aspects at the subindividual level to provide the most characteristic and easily comprehensible examples to discuss the research questions as well as reduce the possibility of confirmation bias. In summary, the nine speech articles analysed for this thesis included 222 cases identified as metaphors and 102 instances marked under a mixed category. The four most used metaphor types in the nine articles were PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING ALONG A PATH TOWARDS A DESTINATION (n=26), UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (n=23), CHANGE IS MOTION (n=21), and ATTENTION IS PROXIMITY (n=15). Furthermore, the most used metaphors do support the consensus-building nature of the speeches as they are used to display shared beliefs and motivate the audience to act together to achieve the desired future goals. The qualitative analysis revealed some more distinct uses of conceptual metaphors regarding specific topics. In the rule of law discourse, CONTAINER metaphors were used to discuss the measures and extent to which EU legislation extends, whereas the talk around the second priority, sustainable development, was characterised by the use of BUILDING as well as SEEING metaphors as speakers emphasised the importance of shared efforts to build a more sustainable future. For climate action, the discussion was most clearly dominated by the MOTION AND JOURNEY metaphors, which was expected since climate change is an ongoing process that the world has dealt with over many years and governmental periods. Lastly, the fourth priority, security, was mostly addressed in terms of the MOTION AND JOURNEY metaphors, but also PERSON metaphors. Previous research on conceptual metaphors suggests that metaphors influence our ideological flexibility by helping people to understand abstract issues by grounding them in something more familiar, but the conceptualisation may also infuse attitudes with subjective confidence that makes them highly resistant to change, I argue it is important to study the ways metaphors are used to generate new perspectives on persistent problems in addition to those that reinforce and defend conclusions and ideologies. As a result, this thesis sheds light on the way the representative ministers of the Finnish presidency talked about abstract contexts and what kind of conceptualisations are used in their international political discussion regarding the matters of the Council of the EU