Metaphors as a rhetorical figure in Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream

Abstract

In the case of speeches, a writer’s style of writing or speaking is worth analyzing, especially when this style can serve as a powerful tool to convey the writer’s message as well as to attract the readers or listeners’ attention in keeping on reading or listening and appreciating the writer or speaker more. In this case, a writer or speaker can use certain linguistic features to function as foregrounding elements in the text. This paper focuses on the use of metaphors as a rhetorical figure used by Martin Luther King in his speech, I Have a Dream.  Furthermore, this paper will see how these metaphors become interesting and effective foregrounding elements that can attract the readers’ or listeners’ attention. The method used in analyzing this is the descriptive method with the referential technique. The grand theory used is Stylistics, which is a study of style in language, or more specifically, the study of distinctive linguistic features. This analysis results in the findings that the metaphors in the speech are proved to be a powerful feature in conveying King’s messages.