As metáforas conceptuais da palavra paz nos relatórios do Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas: uma análise baseada em corpus digital

Abstract

The present research aims at investigating how the word peace is understood, in terms of meaning, by the Security Council of the United Nations. In order to do so, thirty seven official reports written by the Security Council, from August 1994 to June 2009, about the peace missions in thirty one areas/countries which presented threat to international peace and to international security during that period are analyzed. According to the Counselour Gilda Santos Neves, Head of UN Division, Ministry of External Relations, in her book O Brasil e a Criação da Comissão para a Consolidação da Paz (2008), peace is something which is consolidated, not built. This statement guides the present research, as the aim here is to map the linguistic expressions realized through the word peace . This research draws on the theory of the cognitive metaphor, by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), as well as the study proposed by Deignan (2005) in her book entitled Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics, which aims at providing the benefits the cognitive metaphor approach can obtain through the analysis of digitalized corpora. After compiling the reports of the Security Council and preparing them to be read by the software used, all the occurrences of the word peace were extracted. From 686 occurrences found, only the ones with metaphorical meanings were taken into consideration and nine conceptual metaphors were created altogether. The research suggests that, for the Security Council, peace is deeply desired not only by the population of the conflict zones but also by the international community. In spite of this fact, peace is not easily built or established. Achieving peace implies following a process with different phases, as well as overcoming obstacles and drawbacks which appear in the middle of the course. Therefore, several investments must be made by everyone involved and interested in global peace. Finally, it can be concluded that, according to the metaphors analysed here, the point of view of the Counselor Gilda Santos Neves is right, as the results of this study show that the concept of peace, for the Security Council, is not of something which must be built from its very beginning