Towards a rhetorical analysis of the metaphor in the Moroccan political discourse: The story of the donkey and the wolf as an example

Abstract

As one of the linguistic phenomena in the political discourse, which in itself is persuasive and argumentative speech, that’s based on building a mental conceptual pattern, as perceptive Linguistics see, metaphor acts as a way of bringing closer two places or two situations by looking at one through the other based on multiple intellectual argumentative goals and persuasive and communicative strategies.  And because the political discourse is a generalized controversy that knows the addressee whether in a physical or mental form which contributes to its communicative movement.  This research reading deals with the metaphor of the story of the donkey and the wolf, as a component of an analytical approach to show how the presence of the metaphor in the Moroccan political discourse today transcends the mechanisms of communication, clarification, influence, misleading to overshadowing, as well as the cancellation, incitement, domination, and the grant of legitimacy, by using a violent metaphorical and symbolic language loaded with feelings, emotions, values and moral judgments and by the use of rhetorical strategies, through interlacing political discourse and other discourses such as narrative, literary or religious ones, which will enable an accurate understanding of the metaphor by the deliberative, communicative and argumentative dimension that distinguishes it, as well as to understand the functioning of the current Moroccan political discourse mechanisms.