WHAT SHALL I CALL YOU? GENDER-BASED ANALYSIS OF METAPHOR USAGE IN ORATORY SPEECHES

Abstract

In our social life there are many occasions that call for delivering a speech. Speeches given at celebrations and other social events are often made with the intention to persuade or at least to impress. In my study I look into twenty oratory speeches: ten given by women and ten by men. Half of these were given at public forums, while the other half was delivered at the traditional Kossuth Oratory Contest organized for university students in Budapest. The objective of the research was to map the imagery sources of the metaphors used, on the one hand by public speakers and, on the other, by the students, and to see whether there were marked differences between the metaphoric features of their speeches. Special attention was paid to the question of whether the choice of metaphors was influenced by the fact that the speech was intended for an audience of the speakers’ own gender. Other important points were whether the metaphorical character was the result of a wider context, cognitive based, or linguistic-stylistic, as well as of the rhetorical procedures it was integrated into the speeches.