Importance of Political Rhetoric Discipline - Essay Example

The Institute is a think-thank that offers its expertise and research to progressives to help the latter understand and learn how to communicate their messages. 1 Lakoff’s contribution to political rhetoric is his study of metaphors about political discourse. Lakoff asserts that metaphors are not merely occasional figures of speech but are a cognitive phenomenon implying that language in itself is metaphorical. The ability to create metaphors is made possible by the use of a source domain as a reference to a target domain using areas of experience or semantic frames.

Thus the metaphor war on terror and others like it coined to refer to the 9/11 incident was drawn from the war frame idea signifying a relentless battle against an enemy. 2 The function of metaphors in political rhetoric, according to Lakoff, is that they determine how people perceive phenomena and hence, how they act. Metaphors likewise act to highlight a particular aspect of a phenomenon whilst concealing some other aspects. In addition, Lakoff theorizes that the processes of thinking are structured metaphorically which in turn is reflected by speech but when metaphors are used intentionally, they become debatable.

3 Murray Edelman (1919-2001) was a multi-awarded professor who taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin until he died in 2001. He initially focused his attention on the field of labor-management relations but eventually turned to the subject of symbolic politics and the subjective part of politics and power, which would preoccupy him for the next forty years of his life. Some of his works are The Symbolic Uses of Politics in 1964; Politics as a Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence in 1971; Political Language: Words that Succeed and Politics that Fail in 1977; Constructing the Political Spectacle in 1995, and; The Politics of Misinformation in 2001.

4 Edelman’s books were seen as major contributions to the development of people’s perception of political policies.
Edelman viewed politics as being underpinned by two premises.