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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Metonymy in Spanish and American parliamentary speeches: Obama’s State of the Union Address versus Rajoy’s State of the Nation Address

subject

description

This study attempts to analyze the metonymies used in the Economy section of two equivalent parliamentary speeches: the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain, which belong to two different debate traditions. The present study aims at answering the following research questions:What metonymies do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in their American and Spanish parliamentary speeches in an attempt to convince the public of economic victory?What are the similarities and differences between the role of metonymy in shaping public opinion about economic recovery in America and Spain in both speeches?To answer these questions, we use the method of conceptual metonymy (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) which serves to determine the role that metonymy plays in swaying the public’s opinion to their side and, thus, it is a tool of manipulation. The results indicate that Democrat Obama and Conservative Rajoy used metonymies (and their interactions with metaphors) ideologically as they attempted to persuade their audiences that economic recovery was a reality and gain public support for them, replaced the discourse of crime for the discourse of a natural tragedy and stressed Us and Our good actions and Them and Their bad actions. Despite the similarities, both politicians used metonymies to a different extent and used them to stress different aspects of their countries’ economic recovery.