Metaphor in the ‘‘Strict Father’’ and ‘‘Nurturant Parent’’ cognitive models: Theoretical issues raised in an empirical study

Abstract

The metaphorical components of two cognitive models of moral/political systems, presented in Lakoff (1996 [2002]), were tested empirically, using a set of televised debates between two candidates for US president as data. Few verbal metaphoric expressions were found in the data which directly reflected the conceptual metaphors proposed in the models. However, a large number of mostly non-metaphoric expressions were found which constitute entailments of the models. This suggests a form of reasoning according to the logic of the proposed metaphors. The speakers’ metaphoric gestures in one of the debates were then coded and analyzed. Quantitative analysis produced results similar to the linguistic analysis, but qualitative analysis highlighted significant differences between the models, both in terms of their composition and how they can be expressed. The study raises methodological issues for metaphor research, and theoretical questions about the ways of identifying and labeling conceptual metaphors and about the status of cognitive and cultural models.

Moral Politics in the 2008 Presidential Convention Acceptance Speeches

“…Thus, this research extends Cienki's (2005) study of the theory of moral politics into a new political context with an examination of four new speakers' political rhetoric. In addition to documenting specific instantiations of Nurturant Parent and Strict Father moral worldviews as other research has done (Cienki, 2005), we also examined the political issues (e.g., the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, education, tax policy) that the candidates addressed in their speeches. Including an analysis of both moral themes and issue priorities in this study allowed us to determine whether instantiations of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent morality were used more often in the context of certain social, political, and economic issues.…”

“…Rather than focusing on individual psychological instantiations of Lakoff's two worldviews, Cienki (2005) examined elite political communications: statements in the series of presidential debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Cienki found support for Lakoff's (2002) assertions that political elites attempt to influence political outcomes by making salient to voters the metaphors that are closely tied to their ideological positions.…”

“…Including an analysis of both moral themes and issue priorities in this study allowed us to determine whether instantiations of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent morality were used more often in the context of certain social, political, and economic issues. Issues are particularly important to consider because partisan differences in issue emphasis may account for part of any partisan differences in the use of moral metaphors, a possibility that previous research (i.e., Cienki, 2005) did not explore.…”

“…This study is one of the first to examine manifestations of moral metaphors in communication from political elites during an election campaign (but also see Cienki, 2005). As such, our study focused on nominating convention speeches, which are crafted for a specific audience and campaign purpose.…”

Applying corpus linguistics methodology to psycholinguistics research

“…The present study adopts a cognitive approach to foreign language learning and acknowledges the importance of learners' interaction with the environment, as well as the importance of the social context in learners' embodied cognition (Gibbs 2006). Cognitive linguistics regards language as closely interacting with other mental faculties, such as perception, vision, memory and sensorimotor skills (Cienki 2005), and not as an autonomous module (Fodor 1983) in our minds. These domain-general mechanisms are responsible for all learning, and not only language learning.…”