ABSTRACT
Giving a political speech is one of the platforms used by politicians to explain and to attract the attention of the society toward the issues they intend to convey. However, politics is a complicated issue which is hard to be understood and digested. Thus, in order to make the society understand, the politician uses metaphorical expressions to simplify the complexity because human thought processes are largely metaphorical. Not to mention, the deliberate intention of the politician in choosing particular metaphorical concept implies hidden ideologies that the politician have. This study is conducted to reveal the ideologies of the most powerful politician in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who uses metaphorical expressions in expressing his concerns about the nuclear deal agreement.
There are two problems formulated in this study. The first one is identifying the metaphorical concepts found in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech by determining the source domain and abstract domain of the metaphorical expressions. The second one is finding the ideologies within the speech using the metaphorical expressions found inside it.
The object of study is the translated speech of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’ July 18 2015 related to nuclear deal agreement. The study employs Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in answering the first problem. The first step is finding the metaphorical expressions by using the lexical semantic approach to define the words in isolated meaning. The next step is applying componential analysis strategy to compare semantic properties of particular metaphorical expressions with another expressions that are closely related to it. Then, the source domain and target domain of the metaphorical expression is determined through set of correspondences and context of the speech. In revealing the ideologies of the speech, it is strated with the hypothesis. To prove the hypothesis, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is applied by classifying the metaphorical expressions that reflect particular ideologies into one and examine the meaning beyond the metaphorical expressions.
There are 15 metaphorical expressions found in the study classified into 9 metaphorical concepts. Those concepts are journey, product, building, judge, war, barrier, human, container, and valuable commodity metaphor. Khamenei uses metaphorical expressions whenever he addresses the negotiation process of nuclear deal agreement and the relationship with The United States of America. For the ideologies, Khamenei stands for the national confidence and anti-Americanisms.
