Grammatica e stile: metafore del possesso nei discorsi dei Presidenti del Consiglio italiani

This paper presents a framework for investigating the stylistic aspects of political speech us- ing a cognitive linguistic approach that focuses on the grammaticalization and lexicalization patterns expressing possession. Possession is viewed as an oriented and asymmetrical rela- tionship between two entities in discourse: the Possessor (PSR) and the Possessum (PSM). Possessive metaphors are thus expected to capture the ways in which political representatives relate to their institutional interlocutors in public discourse. To achieve this goal, a corpus of spontaneous political speech was analyzed. The collected sample contributes to the refinement of the different metaphors of possession described in the literature and expands their number by two. The analysis also reveals that some posses- sive metaphors are more productive and common than others.