Metaphors of morality in American and Russian political discourses

This book researches the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent family morality models and their metaphors, investigated initially by George Lakoff (1996) to explain the conservative (the U.S. Republican Party) and liberal (the U.S. Democratic Party) worldviews. Based on the claim of the (near-)universality of the mentioned family models (Lakoff 1996; Lakoff & Johnson 1999), this study aims to test an application of Lakoff's moral metaphors to the analysis of political discourses other than American. This is to be achieved through an investigation and comparison of the linguistically realized moral metaphors and their entailments in the speeches of the American and Russian presidents: democrat B. Obama and conservative V. Putin. The working hypothesis is that the rhetoric of Barack Obama is of the Nurturant Parent nature, while Vladimir Putin must exhibit a strong tendency to the Strict Father rhetoric.