A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In American And Chinese Presidential Speeches

According to contemporary cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson(1980),metaphor is not just a rhetorical device but more importantly it is a universal way of thinking,as well as a cognitive instrument.Metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life,and it is everywhere in our thinking and everyday language.Our ordinary conceptual system,in terms of which we think and act,is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.Thus,political language is metaphorical in essence too.Political language has been studied for a long time and can be tracked back to Aristotle's time.A majority of the studies deal with political language from the perspectives of rhetoric, pragmatics,and functional linguistics.In the past dozens of years,with the development of cognitive linguistics,more and more scholars have attempted to investigate into political language from the angle of metaphor.But hardly are there contrastive studies of the American political language and Chinese political language from the perspective of metaphor.This thesis attempts to apply Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory to the account of political discourse.The purpose of the contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in American presidential speeches and Chinese presidential speeches is to find out the similarities and differences between them and analyze the underlying reasons,as well as to discuss the functions of conceptual metaphors in political discourse.The data used in this study are the public speeches of American former President George W. Bush and the public speeches of Chinese President Hu Jintao.In this thesis the Critical Metaphor Approach is adopted,which is a corpus-based approach to metaphor analysis that "aims to reveal the covert intentions of language users"(Charteris-Black,2004:34).It includes the three stages of metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation,and metaphor explanation.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this study of conceptual metaphors in the American and Chinese presidential speeches.It is found out that the major conceptual metaphors in American presidential speeches are: Journey Metaphors,War Metaphors,Building Metaphors,Family Metaphors and Religion Metaphors and major conceptual metaphors in Chinese presidential speeches are:Journey Metaphors,War Metaphors,Building Metaphors,Family Metaphors,and Circle Metaphors.The study shows that there are some similar metaphors in the American data and Chinese data: Journey Metaphors and Building Metaphors;there are some other similar metaphors in American and Chinese data which have the same names but different connotations,such as War Metaphors and Family Metaphors;and there are also some conceptual metaphors unique to American and Chinese data:Circle metaphors and Religion Metaphors.The reason lies chiefly in the differences between American and Chinese culture.It is summarized that there are five major functions of conceptual metaphors in American and Chinese presidential speeches:the persuasive function,the motivation function,the simplification function,the "bridge" function and the "filter" function.The study can contribute to a deeper understanding of American and Chinese politics and the two cultures,which can shed light on the translation of American and Chinese political discourse. As far as TEFL is concerned,it can help the Chinese students to have a better command of English via a deeper understanding of American culture.In the field of language research,this is but a tentative study from the new angle of metaphor,which can be further dealt with from many other angles such as politics.In addition,this study can promote the cultural exchange between China and America.