Metaphorising Corruption in the Fourth Republic of Ghana: A Discourse Dynamics to Metaphor and Cultural Model Approach

Abstract

In many cultures and democracies around the world, corruption as a social phenomenon has been described and defined variously but commonly as a shameful act and a criminal offence. Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, which is the basis for the current democracy in the country, also defines and describes corruption in these terms. Even though the phenomenon and its common definition appear to be near-universal, findings from cross-cultural studies suggest that different socio cultural groups filter the conceptualisations of concepts, even near-universal ones, to reflect construals that are salient to their societies, and cultures. While Western democracy is motivated by Western-based cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian, 2003, 2013), it is now practised by many cultures around the world. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of research on how culture-specific contexts influence different notions of democracy because of the ways a people use language to shape their understanding and to encode such understandings of such notions including corruption. Metaphor as a linguistic tool forms part of everyday language use and that helps us to understand people’s conceptualisation/understanding of concepts. This study employs the discourse dynamics model of metaphor by Cameron (2010) and the cultural model approach by Sharifian (2003) as theoretical and analytical frameworks to investigate the (cultural) metaphorical conceptualisation of corruption in Ghanaian English as it occurs in selected presidential speeches during the Fourth Republic of Ghana. The present study examined fifteen (15) State of the Nation Addresses (SONAs) delivered by the five (5) Ghanaian presidents of the Fourth Republic to identify linguistic choices such as metaphors, deixis and seemingly neutral metaphors that were used to encode the cultural understanding of corruption in Ghana. The analysis of the data revealed that corruption was metaphorically conceptualised (generally) as A FIGHT, A DISEASE, A LEGACY, and AN ENEMY while measures to solving corruption were metaphorically conceptualised as WAR. However, the following systematic metaphors were employed to conceptualise corruption: CORRUPTION AS A LEGACY, CORRUPTION as SOMETHING CONCEALED, CORRUPTION AS SOMETHING ROTTEN and CORRUPTION AS SOMETHING TO BE HIDDEN. These systematic metaphors were systematically linked to the following cultural schemas/models in Ghana: THE NATION AS A FAMILY, POLITICAL LEADERS AS PARENTS (NOT TO BE CRITICISED PUBLICLY), GIFT-GIVING AS SHOW OF APPRECIATION and FAVOURITISM AS BUILDING FAMILY TIES AND SOLIDARITY. Using communicative strategies such as indirectness and linguistic features such as deixis these metaphor choices help the presidents to challenge and negotiate prevailing social, political, ideological, and cultural attitudes towards corruption, as it has been described in the 1992 Constitution. Corruption in the 1992 Constitution is described in relation to the abuse of public office for private gain. This research contributes to theory by combining the discourse dynamics and cultural model approaches to studying metaphorical conceptualisation relating to corruption and demonstrating that it is not enough to consider the discourse event, but that the extralinguistic context (historical, cultural, ideological) presents important clues to understanding the motivation for the metaphorical conceptualisation employed by the participants. It also contributes to the argument on the need to review the use of universal definitions when dealing with context-specific issues.