Unpacking the Cultural Commonsense: CDA and the Indexicality of Political Metaphors in UK Conservative Party Manifestos

ABSTRACT 

Political discourse, and particularly election manifestos, is one of the main places where metaphors bring into existence public meanings of national identity, policy, and power, and the UK Conservative Party manifestos between 1900 and 2019 furnish a great case study in which to look at these linguistic dynamics in the face of cultural and historical changes like Brexit. The aims of this study were to identify key political metaphors in these manifestos, analyze their indexical links with cultural commonsense, and study their ideological roles with the help of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to bring to light hidden power relations. The approach went for a mixed-methods design, mixing corpus linguistics software (WordSmith, Sketch Engine, etc.) and MIPVU for metaphor identification, Fairclough's three-dimensional model of CDA for textual and sociocultural analysis, and Silverstein's theory of indexicality for teasing out pragmatic signaling, as applied to a 1.2-million-word corpus with a target sub-corpus of 2010–2019. Results identify 478 metaphorical expressions with dominant source domains of body/person (34%), machine/container (25%), journey/motion (18%), and war/conflict (15%), with a density rise to 0.56 per 1,000 words after 2010, in which metaphors like NATION AS BODY and AUTONOMY IS FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT index cultural narratives of autonomy and individualism, stoking hegemonic ideologies. This study states that increased sensitivity to figurative framing can allow citizens to critically engage with political messages, developing discourse literacy.