A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And American Political Discourse

This thesis attempts to apply the conceptual metaphor theory to political discourse analysis. Through the contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in the public speeches of Chinese President and American President to find out the similarities and differences, and discusses the functions and basis of the conceptual metaphors. The history of western scientific research on metaphors could be roughly divided into three periods: (1) The rhetorical research on metaphors-from Aristotle to Richards, about from 300 BC to 1930s;(2) The semantic research on metaphors from logical, philosophical, and linguistic angles-from 1930s to early 1970s;(3) Multidisciplinary research on metaphor-from early 1970s till now. In 1977, Ricoeur published The Rule of Metaphor which pushed metaphor research into semantic field. In 1980, Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson formed the basic framework of modern cognitive research on metaphor, freed metaphor research from the traditional rhetorical view, and guided the research into cognitive field. Started from late 1970s, metaphor research flourished among European and American scholars (Ortony, 1979;Honeck, 1980;Cooper, 1986;Kittay, 1987;Lakoff and Turner, 1989). Recent research has explored larger space for metaphor study (Indurkhya, 1992;Steen, 1994;Radman, 1995;Mio & Katz, 1996;White, 1996;Goatly, 1997;Leezenberg, 2001;Thomas, 2004). Anyhow as for metaphor in politics, they are often taken as separate examples in metaphor research with seldom systemic study. Lakoff has made some research on American political metaphors recently, for example, metaphors of terrorism, metaphors of war, metaphors in foreign affairs, etc. (Lakoff, 2001, 2003, 2004). However there is nearly no systemic research on metaphors in politics.The research on metaphor in China didn't begin until 1992, when Metaphors We Live By was translated. However most of the studies are about the comparison of similar rhetorical devices, or just introduce the achievements of foreign studies (林书武 1994, 1995, 1997;石毓智, 1995;赵艳芳, 1995;束定芳, 1997;丁建民, 2001), no systematic researches. Based on the data collected, from 1994 to September, 2005, there are 39 research articles about conceptual metaphor, among which 13 are about the comparison and contrast of Chinese and English, usually are about one word ("anger"-1998, "journey"-2004, "love" 2004) or just the macro comparison. However there is nocontrastive study of political metaphor, let alone contrastive study of political conceptual metaphor. For conceptual metaphors in politics, there is no systematic study based on corpus.This research sets out to apply conceptual metaphor theory to the study of political language. Based on the corpus, the author attempts to make a contrastive study of conceptual metaphor in Chinese and American politics and to explore the research method in this field. The data used in this paper are the public speeches of Chinese former President Jiang Zemin from 14th, August, 1998 to 28th, September, 1998 during the "1998 floods" period, with a corpus of 16,279 Chinese characters, and public speeches of American President George W. Bush from 31st, August, 2005 to 26th, September, 2005 during the "hurricane" period, with a corpus of 16,069 words. The methodology adopted is Steen's "five-step" of metaphor identification and the conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff.The research results are as follows: in Chinese data the major classifications of conceptual metaphors are Family Metaphors, Circle Metaphors, War Metaphors, and Journey Metaphors;in American data the major classifications of conceptual metaphors are Family Metaphors, Human Metaphors, Drama Metaphors, and Journey Metaphors. Circle Metaphors and War Metaphors are specific to Chinese data, while Human Metaphors and Drama Metaphors are specific to American data. Although there are Family Metaphors and Journey Metaphors in both Chinese and American data, the content varies. As for the function, motivation function tends to take the most percentage in Chinese data while simplification function does in American data. From the aspects of religion, history, and image, the basis of conceptual metaphors have been discussed. Besides, some other unique conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American politics are also discussed.The results of this research may offer some help in further understanding of Chinese and American politics, and Chinese and American culture as well, also the translation of Chinese and American political discourse, and the learning of English as a second language. It could be further explored through other angles, as sociolinguistics, and also provides some hints for Chinese literature research.