The present paper aims to demonstrate the ways in which metaphors in a fifteenth century political discourse written in a pre-modern Italian language variety function as mitigators for face threatening acts. The metaphor functions as an implicit speech act and its value results to be in upholding sensitive political balance.
The present paper focuses on the political metaphor as a mixed semantic and linguistic phenomenon. We wish to consider the possibility that metaphors express indirect speech acts and more specifically, those in which the sender of the message wishes to avoid threatening the receiver’s negative face with the goal of maintaining political balance and obtaining political points. The corpus for this research is made of letters which contain directives from the Republic of Ragusa to the ambassadors in the Bosnian Kingdom during the fifteenth century. We are basing the research on speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle 1969) and Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness research in an attempt to apply synchronic theories diachronically and analyze the illocutionary force of metaphors used in political discourse. Much of political discourse is implicit and we intend to demonstrate that metaphors are one of the ways in which manifest speech acts that would traditionally be deemed impolite. For the purpose of this research, we focus on the acts of threats, orders, directives and requests with the goal of proving that the metaphor is a part of a repertoire of mitigating strategies used to soften the illocutionary force of said speech acts. We hypothesize that metaphorical speech acts and the illocutionary force of a metaphor are used as mitigators for face threatening acts and to minimize eventual impoliteness. The results of this research imply that metaphors are used to uphold the sensitive balance of power and to avoid appearing impolite. Next steps in our research include determining the preference of metaphors as a mitigating strategy over others and the frequency of their use.
