The aim of this study is to identify recurrent metaphors in the official speeches of the president of Brazil, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. The corpus was made up of 868 talks, amounting to nearly 1.8 million words. With the help of Corpus Linguistics tools and a theoretical background centering around conceptual metaphor, we noted that the word 'conquista' ('conquest') stood out from among the other words with high metaphoric potential. The analysis of how this word was used showed that it is highly productive, generating a wide range of metaphors by combining with a large number of topics. This indicated that the 'conquest' is a key metaphor in the President's rhetorical arsenal, despite being little noted. In addition, the set of metaphors relative to 'conquest' is coherent with the President's life and ideology, which lends credibility to his discourse.
Metaphor; corpus linguistics; politics; discourse
