THE ROLE OF GESTURES IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF MULTIMODAL METAPHORS: analysis of a political-electoral debate

This paper intends to analyze the role of gestures in the construction of multimodal metaphors in the "political-electoral debate" genre. Theoretically, we considered that metaphoric gestures can be analyzed as expressions of conceptual metaphors. We mainly approached and illustrated the importance of spatial orientation in the emergence of the metaphors in the political discourse. Methodologically, we have selected four sequences of a second-tour debate. Starting from the operational concept of gesture excursion, we specifically observed the multimodal metaphoricity in speech and gesture compounds. After analyzing the metaphors found in the debate sequences, we established a continuumbetween metaphors of a conventional nature and those of a new nature. We also tried to establish a comparative relation between the metaphors used by the two candidates, Dilma Rousseff (from the Labor Party) and José Serra (from the Social Democratic Party).