Analysis Of Martin Luther King's Speech 'We Cannot Walk Alone'

We can observe the conceptual metaphor use in this speech, for instance; “We cannot walk alone. […]. We cannot turn back.” (38) In defining conceptual metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) state that this term refers to metaphor where the source and the target domain used as concepts. So, in the statement “We cannot walk alone” the frame of JOURNEY is used, i.e. their movement to gain their rights is conceptualized as a journey. As we can use our background knowledge about a journey is that travelling alone is not safe, while a successful journey is that when we travel with a group. While in the statement “We cannot turn back” we can say that turning our back, from the difficulties that we face in our journey, means that we are not strong enough

King used metaphors from all kinds of donor domains, for instance; the donor domain of nature: “lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” (7) and “to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood” (22). In these two examples, King used the domain of nature in order to describe the inequality that his group was suffering from. Later on, King used the term “heat” in positive and negative way as in; “this sweltering summer of the Negro 's legitimate” (25) and “Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression” (56). Lakoff and Turner (1989) claimed that metaphor is non-reversible, i.e. the word heat could be mapped onto a positive concept as in “sweltering summer of the Negro 's legitimate” and onto negative concept as in “the heat of injustice […], the heat of oppression”. He also used the donor domain of weather phenomena to serve the same goal of gaining justice: “left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality” (47) and “the whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake …” (29). Additionally, we can see the domain of family is used by King for the reason to create a warm atmosphere between the nation and stop the racism between white and black people, for example: “every American was to fall heir”, “white brothers” (36) and “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers” (59). Another example of image metaphor domain is the domain of the human body: “satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” (32). In the formal example, King made the human necessity to freedom as equal as the human necessity to drink. More example of image metaphor is the domain of rhythm of day