Metaphors of light and darkness in a corpus of memorable American political speeches

The paper aims at investigating the evocative power of metaphor in a number of remarkable American political speeches. The study will concentrate on the metaphorical framing of political issues in terms of light and darkness. As research in cognitive linguistics has demonstrated (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989) light and darkness play a significant role in people’s understanding of antithetical concepts such as knowledge and ignorance, life and death. In political discourse, this potential for antithesis is chiefly used to convey either positive (light) or 5 negative (darkness) evaluations, typically in compliance with more general rhetorical purposes of the speech. The analysis will be carried out on a corpus of speeches which American rhetoricians ranked among the top 100 speeches of the twentieth century in a national survey (http://www. news.wisc.edu/misc/speeches). Considering the impact of these speeches, an investigation in terms of their metaphoricity is expected to provide additional insights into the reasons that made them memorable. Overall, the study intends to illustrate how the evocative concepts of light and darkness have facilitated the communication of central political ideas, values and beliefs in twentieth century American political rhetoric.