Revealing More Than Intended: On Metaphor Shifts, Clashes and Contradictions in Public Discourse

Abstract: This paper applies the theoretical framework of analysis provided by the Cognitivist school and the concept of metaphorical shift (Shen and Balaban, 1999) on a corpus of public speeches and statements issued by local authorities (political and church leaders) and media reporters between 2024 and 2025. The corpus is multilingual, consisting of English, Italian, Spanish and Romanian fragments. The analysis points out cases of metaphorical incoherence, but also cases of real metaphorical ‘clash’, that is, partial or total incompatibility between the chosen metaphors (Kimmel, 2009). These situations often have visible semantic and pragmatic consequences for the audience: it becomes manifest, for the attentive hearer, that the speaker, often involuntarily, expresses the opposite meaning of what he or she pretends to sustain