Metaphor, topoi, and cognitive heuristics in climate governance: a dual-staged metaphorical argumentation analysis of climate political speech (opens in new tab)

Although metaphors are widely recognised as central to climate communication, scant studies have explored how they function as structured arguments that exploit cognitive heuristics in political discourse. This study proposes a dual-staged model of metaphorical argumentation that links Toulmin’s layout, discourse-historical topoi and cognitive accounts of heuristics, applied to a corpus-assisted analysis of US officials’ speeches at the 2021 Leaders Summit on Climate. Using Wmatrix-assisted m...