Abstract
Successful politicians, to make their language persuasive, need to appeal to and target attitudes and emotions that are already within the audience. When the audience perceives that their beliefs are understood and supported, this means that the politician has succeeded in creating connections between him/herself and the audience, and the policy that he/she wishes to communicate. To be persuasive, politicians employ a variety of rhetorical strategies such as metaphors, analogies, repetition, contrastive pairs, parallel structure …etc. that are used in varying proportions among politicians. As metaphors can reflex the way that we think and communicate in terms of images created by them, Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) has typically become the approach that adapts metaphorical analysis which aims to reveal the implied intentions and ideologies of language users. The purpose of this study is to reveal what kind of metaphors that were used by the USA presidents; Barack Obama 2008 and 2012, Donald Trump 2016 and Joseph Biden 2020 in their victory speeches, and how they employ these metaphors to persuade their followers about their statements. This paper has adapted the Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) theory Charteris-Black (2004) who gives three criteria regarding analysing metaphors; linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive criteria. The study has found that the use of metaphors as a tool to form social semiotics by politicians is not accidental but ideologically motivated to help politicians in manipulating linguistic resources to suit their interest. It found that ideological investments are derived by not only linguistic and rhetoric devices but also by the politicians’ cognitive experiences. It revealed that using metaphors by politicians is purposive as these metaphors present information to persuade the reader to take a definite course of action due to the pragmatic function of ‘presupposition’ that highlights the information of the whole speech.