CRITICAL METAPHORS OF SUSTAINABILITY IN PRESIDENTIAL, ORGANIZATIONAL AND UNITED NATIONS SPEECHES

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Résumé

From the perspective of Critical Metaphor Analysis, this paper investigates one speech from the President of the Republic of Seychelles, one from an international economic organization and three from United Nations Representatives, all pronounced in 2025 and the way they clash with the African conception of harmony among humans, society and nature in a sustainable development context. That African conception called Ubuntu stresses the interconnectedness of humans, nature and society and the need for compassion in the relation of humans to the other two. The paper explores metaphors in the speeches by using linguistic, conceptual and pragmatic criteria. It is grounded on concepts borrowed from Cognitive Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. Five excerpts, one from each of the five speeches, have been selected and presented in a table. The metaphors in these excerpts have been identified and analyzed through their metafunctional features, the conceptual metaphors and the ideological clues they embed. The results and the discussion show that the speeches are replete with metaphors on economic growth, water and climate issues, biodiversity, human safety and global governance. Climate issues are presented as risk and humans as liabilities in these issues, sustainable development as transforming nature and humans as potential obstacles and global governance as the solution. All of which clash with the need for compassion in the relation of humans to nature and society.

Mots-clés

analysis, climate, critical, development, metaphor