A Contrastive Analysis Of Political Metaphor Between China And America

Metaphor is an important topic that has drawn many intellectuals' attention. It has been studied for more than two thousand years. From Aristotle, metaphor has been studied from various aspects including classification, characteristics, experiential bases and functions. Some linguists such as Ricoeur(1975), Gibbs(1994) and Lakoff(2005) has already pointed out that metaphor has discourse function. Lakoff(2005) introduces metaphor into political discourse. Black(2004) adopts the method of Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the metaphors in political contexts. But they all don't systematically clarify the function of metaphor in political context. The research on metaphor in China began in 1992, when Metaphors We Live By was translated. However, most of the research are about the comparison of similar rhetorical devices, or just the introduction of foreign countries'achievement. Few are deeply and systemacity. And about the contrastive analysis on political metaphor is almost none. Based on previous research on metaphor, and on the basis of corpus this thesis adopts the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to do contrastive analysis on political metaphor.The thesis chooses political speeches of the two countries'top leaders from 2001 to 2010. The methodology adopts Steen's five-procedure and Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory to identify metaphors from corpus.The results are as follows:the major conceptual metaphors in Chinese corpus are Building Metaphor, Journey Metaphor, Water metaphor, Human metaphor and Family Metaphor; the major conceptual metaphors in American corpus are Human Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Journey Metaphor, Nature Metaphor and Drama Metaphor. The unique metaphors to Chinese data are Water Metaphor and Family Metaphor, and the unique metaphors to American data are Nature Metaphor and Drama Metaphor. The two country have common metaphors but they are different in details, the reasons of which are different cultural and religious factors.The results of this reasearch may offer some help to study politics and culture of China and America deeply and also the translation of political discourse. It can help students to master a language comprehensively in language learnig. In the light of language study, this thesis is a new try, and it could be further explored from sociolinguistics and language use in Chinese and American literature.