A Cognitive Study Metaphor In Chinese Political Discourses

Recently, the study of metaphor becomes a hot issue in cognitive linguistics. Different from the traditional rhetorical perspective, according to cognitive linguistics, metaphor is not only a formula, but also a reflection of human beings' experience and actions. Many experts and scholars have done some research about metaphor from cognitive perspective. In recent years, they study the relationship between metaphor and real life in cognitive linguistics domain, for example, the analysis of economical discourse or the analysis of news discourse.According to Lakoff and Johnson, our cognitive system is a central part of identifying our everyday realties. And metaphor is one of the important ways which can help us to understand unfamiliar realties in our cognitive system. Most of the basic concepts are metaphorical. There are some classic metaphor models, for example, in the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR, "war" is from the source domain and "argument" is from the target domain. The addressor maps the war onto the argument, which can make the abstract concept of argument become concrete. Meanwhile, we only need to focus on the similarity between the source domain and the target domain, in other words, we can hide the differences when we study metaphors.In 1995, Rohrer studied the metaphor American President used in Gulf War and found out that the government mobilized people to join in the war by applying the proper metaphor successfully. It showed the importance of metaphor in daily life and political events. In 2002, Lakoff introduced metaphor into political discourse analysis. He raised that conceptual metaphor was a powerful analytical tool in the analysis of the addressor's ideology and intention in the political discourse.This thesis employs conceptual metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis as basic theories and adopts both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to analyze, from 2001 to 2010, the 10 pieces of Speech on the New Year Tea Party of the National People's Congress from cognitive perspective. This author discusses the types of metaphor, ideologies behind metaphor and functions of metaphor. This thesis summarizes ten types of conceptual metaphors and 1120 metaphors after metaphor identification, classification, and draws statistical charts to put forward three functions of metaphor in political discourses. The author summarizes the common types of conceptual metaphors in these political metaphors into journey metaphor, building construction metaphor, war metaphor, plant metaphor, human metaphor, chess metaphor, circle metaphor, drama and article metaphor and machine metaphor. Journey metaphor, building construction metaphor, war metaphor, human metaphor and plant metaphor are the common types of conceptual metaphor. Both President Jiang Zemin and President Hu Jintao used a lot of these types of conceptual metaphors. With the development and realization of 10th Five-Year Plan and 11th Five-Year Plan after 2003, the usage frequency of circle metaphor and chess metaphor are increased. Even the addressors and backgrounds are different, the human being has the same cognition to some extend, but the different economic and political development of the society can influence the usage of conceptual metaphor. By analyzing the data, the author finds out that the metaphor is essential to the establishment of the ideology. Both President Jiang Zemin and President Hu Jintao have employed metaphors to conceptualize the abstract political notions as concrete concepts in ordinary life to persuade the public to follow the rules of the government. After the detailed analysis, the author summarized three functions of metaphor in political discourse:persuasion function, control function and bridge function. By analyzing the usage of conceptual metaphor and development of Chinese society, the author presents that conceptual metaphor in political discourses can be influenced by the social political and economic development, which can reveal the ideology of the government.The aim of this thesis is to provide a simple method of applying conceptual metaphor theory to help the addressors to understand metaphor and ideology behind it in Chinese political discourse. By simplifying the process of comprehension, the author intends to help the addressors to study the ideologies which are covered by metaphorical expressions. It is hoped that current study can play a small role of studying conceptual metaphor and further researches on it in China.