Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Metaphor in Yoruba Political Oratory: A Multi-Method Investigation

This study presents a multi-method investigation of the cognitive and social dimensions of metaphor in Yoruba political oratory, developing an original integrated framework that combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory with the social semiotics of political communication to analyse how Yoruba political speakers construct, deploy, and negotiate metaphorical meaning in electoral and governance contexts. Political metaphor in African indigenous languages represents a significant gap in the global cognitive linguistics literature, and Yoruba, with its rich proverbial and figurative tradition, offers a particularly productive site for investigation. The research integrates three methodological strands: a discourse corpus analysis of 80 transcribed Yoruba political speeches from Ekiti, Osun, and Oyo State governorship campaigns between 2018 and 2022, a psycholinguistic experiment measuring metaphor processing and persuasive effect in 120 Yoruba-dominant listeners, and an ethnographic study of political speech events in three communities. The corpus analysis maps the source and target domains of political metaphors and identifies the most culturally resonant metaphorical schemas in Yoruba political communication. The psycholinguistic strand tests the persuasive efficacy of metaphorical versus non-metaphorical framings of identical policy positions. Findings reveal that agrarian and kinship-based metaphors produce significantly higher persuasion scores among rural listeners while governance-as-warfare metaphors are most effective with urban male audiences. The study makes original contributions to cognitive linguistics, political communication theory, and the linguistics of Yoruba. Keywords: political metaphor, Yoruba oratory, conceptual metaphor theory, cognitive linguistics, political communication.