Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Political Debates: A Discourse Analysis Study

The art of rhetoric is linked to a very old science, and political speeches have been studied from different approaches ever since the Greeks created the term politics itself. The main aim of the present study, therefore, was to examine linguistic elements in political speeches by the recent 2017 presidential election candidates debates in order to persuade the audience. To this end, the data were collected from the recorded speeches of live TV programs at the Official News of Iran. The political rhetoric used by four challenging candidates present in the debates were analyzed. The linguistic devices explored in this debate included political rhetoric, politeness strategies, and propaganda language. The presidential political debates were analyzed by checking the frequency of speech acts types: Metaphor, metonymy, and voice. The frequency of linguistic features that were used in the third debate by the four candidates was almost the same. Therefore, it might be stated which of the candidates used the features more effectively. Findings of this study might have implications for those concerned with sociolinguistic research and discourse analysis.