A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Chinese And American Political Speeches

This thesis sets out to apply conceptual metaphor theory to the study of political speeches.Based on a contrastive study of the conceptual metaphors in the political speeches of Chinese Chairman Hu Jintao and that of fomer U.S.President Gerorge W. Bush,the author attempts to find out the similarities and differences,and further discusses the underlying cultural factors,explores the relation between author's purpose and the proportion of each metaphor category.Metaphor has been the focus of linguistic study for a long time,for the origin of metaphor research can be traced back to Aristotle period.The two well-known books The Poetics and The Rhetoric of Aristotle represent the start of complete systematic study on metaphor,in which he states that "metaphor are pleasing words that make us learn something","a command of metaphor is the mark of genius"(Aristotle,1458:22 in Cameron & Low,2001:72).But unfortunately,Aristotle underestimates metaphor as no more than a figure of speech,an ornament to language.In 1930s,with the publication of The Philosophy Of Rhetoric,Richards is considered to be the pioneer that illustrates the cognitive nature of metaphor systematically and explicitly.He emphasizes that "thought is metaphorical","we cannot get through three sentences of ordinary fluid discourse without metaphor"(Richard,1936:94).The most distinctive development of metaphor research is achieved by Lakoff and Johnson.In the year of 1980,with the publication of Metaphor We Live By,the study of metaphor turns to a new page,shifting away from the ornamental function of metaphor and the linguistics aspects of metaphor to the cognitive nature of metaphor.From late 1970s,metaphor research has been promoted by European and American scholars(Ortony,1979; Cooper,1986;Kittay,1987;Lakoff &Turner,1989)and metaphor have been studied from different perspectives by linguists around the world.Recently,Lakoff has carried out researches on American political metaphors,such as terrorism metaphor, metaphors of war,metaphors in foreign affaires(Lakoff,2001,2003,2004).But despite of Lakoff's effort on the study of metaphor in political discourse,little systematic study on metaphors in political discourse can be found,not to mention the contrastive study of metaphors in political discourses of different countries. Compared with western countries,the study of metaphor from the cognitive aspect in China is a little late.It is not until 1994,Chinese linguist Zhao Yanfang firstly publishes an article about metaphor cognition.In 1995,Zhao Yanfang first introduces Lakoff and Johnson's revolutionary work Metaphor We Live By to China.Since then metaphor study becomes popular in China.From the year 1995 to 2001,there are 472 articles on the analysis of metaphor published in CNKI;and from 2002 to 2008,the number of articles are dramatically increased to 4415.But among these articles,there is still little systematic study on metaphors in political discourse.This thesis aims at applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the study of metaphors in political discourse.Based on a corpus of 15,365 Chinese characters in the Chinese data and the corpus of 12,918 words in the American data,the author attempts to make a contrastive study of conceptual metaphors in Chinese's Chairman Hu Jintao's and former U.S.President Geroge W.Bush's political speeches,as to find out the similarities and differences between these two corpus and to explore the cultural factors behind them.As we mentioned above,the corpus used in this paper are made up of the political speeches of Chinese Chairman Hu Jintao and that of former U.S.President Bush.The whole corpus can be divided into three categories:(1) Address on Natural Disaster;(2) Address to University Students;and(3) New Year Greetings to the Nation.In Chinese data,three samples are collected,they are President's Speech On Earthquake(May 23,2008);President's Speech at Yale University(April 21,2006) and President's New Year Greetings to The Nation (December 31,2007),while the American data also involves three topics:First,Bush 's Speeches On Hurricane Katrina(2005);Second,Bush's Speeches at Tsinghua University(February 22,2002);and the third one,President Bush's Speech at Christmas(December 24,2006).All of the samples are downloaded from official websites to ensure its validity.The author adopts Steen's "Five-step" metaphor identification method to identify the conceptual metaphors within the whole corpus, and carries out a contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in different language data.After a thorough investigation and careful contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors in these two corpuses,the results are as follows:(1) Although the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson is based on English,the abundant use of metaphors in the Chinese data demonstrates the universality feature of this theory.(2) The six main conceptual metaphor categories in the Chinese data are:Nature Metaphor,Journey Metaphor;Building Metaphor,War Metaphor,Circle Metaphor, and Student Metaphor,While that in the America data are Human Metaphor;Journey Metaphor;Nature Metaphor;Family Metaphor,Drama Metaphor and Student Metaphor.Among these main metaphor categories,Journey Metaphor,Nature Metaphor and Student Metaphor exist both in the Chinese and the American data,and there are some unique metaphor categories only exist in either Chinese or American data.(3) Culture plays an important role in metaphor conceptualization,the underlying differences of conceptual metaphors in these two corpus are as a result of some cultural factors,such as tradition,religion or political system.(4) Accroding to the different background settings,the proportion of each metaphor category may change delicately as to fit the certain purpose of the author.(5) The general principle that governs the conceptual mapping is not only manipulated by our conceptual system,but also can be extracted and restricted at the lexical level.The results of the study turns out to be fruitful,and the author hopes that it may offer some help in the development of systematic study on metaphors in political speeches and in further understanding of Chinese and American culture.However,this thesis is just an attempt to the contrastive study on conceptual metaphors in the political speeches,there are also some drawbacks.The author hopes that further researches can be carried out in the near future.