Abstract

People process information in terms of frames, i.e. conceptual structures that organize world knowledge in rich inferential systems (Fillmore, 1985; Lakoff, 2004). Frames may be activated through public language use and strongly influence people's attitudes towards social and political considerations (Kahneman and Tversky, 1984; Nelson and Oxley, 1999, and much subsequent work). Experimental evidence has showed that metaphoric framing has a significant effect on political issue positioning (Landau et al., 2009) and decision-making (Oppenheimer et al., 2010; Casasanto et al., 2009). The present case study investigates frames and metaphors used by Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian public debate showing some evidence of an overarching conceptual frame related to religious concepts.