The metaphorical construction of ‘people’ in the Iranian political discourse

Abstract The present paper seeks to examine the metaphorical structures that conceptualise people and their status and role in the discourse of the Iranian Supreme Leader. Drawing upon critical cognitive metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) and the theory of agency in language (Duranti, 2004), we approached 300 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader from 1997 to 2023 to figure out how the agency of people in different areas is controlled and constricted by the conceptual properties of the target domains such as war, fight, and prevention. We indicated that the metaphor of fight is employed to conceptualise the ideological and political activism of people and developmental programmes. The metaphor of prevention renders knowledge and consciousness as influential instruments in insulating the IRI from the threats of the enemies. We also found that the metaphor of controllable objects confiscates people’s controlled and constricted agency and conceptualises them as objects of control.