Considering the rise of far-right populisms (Hidalgo-Tenorio et al., 2019; Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017), this paper focuses on the metaphorical construction of polarisation in the tweets of Santiago Abascal and Jair Bolsonaro, that is, the representative far-right populist leaders of Spain and Brazil, respectively. The descriptive and comparative analysis of their tweets is carried out from a critical socio-cognitive viewpoint, that is, considering conceptual metaphors and polarisation as cognitive discursive socio-situated phenomena (Charteris-Black, 2011; Filardo-Llamas et al., 2021; Low et al., 2010; Musolff, 2016; Soares da Silva, 2020). Methodologically, this study presents a corpus-based discourse analysis of Bolsonaro and Abascal's tweets, in the trend of corpora and political discourse studies (Baker & McEnery, 2015; Taylor & Marchi, 2018).
References:
Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (Eds.). (2015). Corpora and Discourse Studies. Integrating Discourse and Corpora. Palgrave Macmillan.
Breeze, R. (2020). Exploring populist styles of political discourse in Twitter. World Englishes, 39(4), 550–567. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12496
Charteris-Black, J. (2011). Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Filardo-Llamas, L., Morales-López, E., & Floyd, A. (Eds.). (2021). Discursive Approaches to Socio-political Polarization and Conflict (preprint). Routledge.
Hidalgo-Tenorio, E., Benítez-Castro, M.-Á., & De Cesare, F. (Eds.). (2019). Populist Discourse: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026751
Koller, V. (2014). Applying Social Cognition Research to Critical Discourse Studies : The Case of Collective Identities. In C. Hart & P. Cap (Eds.), Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies (1st ed., pp. 147–166). Bloomsbury Academic. http://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/contemporary-critical-discourse-studies/ch6-applying-social-cognition-research-to-critical-discourse-studies/
Low, G., Todd, Z., Deignan, A., & Cameron, L. (Eds.). (2010). Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.04.003
Musolff, A. (2016). Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. Bloomsbury Academic.
Peterssen, S., & Soares da Silva, A. (submitted for publication). Polarising metaphors in the Venezuelan Presidential Crisis.
Romano, M., & Porto, M. D. (Eds.). (2016). Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction: Multimodal and cross-linguistic perspectives. John Benjamins. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027267221
Rovira Kaltwasser, C., Taggart, P., Ochoa Espejo, P., & Ostiguy, P. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Populism.
Semino, E., & Demjén, Z. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315672953
Soares da Silva, A. (2020). From economic crisis to austerity policies through conceptual metaphor. A corpus-based comparison of metaphors of crisis and austerity in the Portuguese press. In M. Huang & L.-L. Holmgreen (Eds.), The Language of Crisis. Metaphors, frames and discourses. (pp. 51–86). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.87.02soa
Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (Eds.). (2006). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Mouton de Gruyter.
Taylor, C., & Marchi, A. (Eds.). (2018). Corpus Approaches to Discourse. A Critical Review. Routledge.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2018). Socio-cognitive Discourse Studies. In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (pp. 26–43). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315739342-3
