A Diachronic Analysis Of Political Metaphor

The study of metaphor has undergone quite a long history of over two thousand years, during which a number of competing theories about it have been advanced. Since metaphor is the juncture to connect language system, human cognition and social environments, metaphor analysis entails not only the study of language itself, but that of cognitive mechanism and communicative context as well. Following such an approach, the studies of political metaphors must take the social, political and historical contexts into consideration, which necessitates a diachronic approach to the collection of data with historical significance. In order to explore the dynamic process of metaphor use beyond the previous political metaphor researches that were mainly carried out from a synchronic perspective, this study is designed as a diachronic approach to a tentative inquiry into the changes of metaphor use in Chinese political discourse since China launched the reform and opening up.By resorting to Critical Metaphor Analysis as an analytic framework, this thesis aims to identify the main metaphors used in Chinese political discourse during the last three decades (1978-2007), describe how the use of these metaphors changed over time, and explore the reasons why these changes emerged in terms of the cognitive characteristics and pragmatic functions of metaphor. For the purposes of this study, we collect the editorials on "two sessions" from People's Daily during that period to establish a corpus consisting of six sub-corpora for six five-year periods, and segment the Chinese texts into separate lexicons with the assistance of ICTCLAS 1.0. The study is conducted in three stages. First, we read the texts carefully to identify the metaphor keywords and utilize Antconc 3.2.1w to search these keywords in the corpus and calculate the number of their valid occurrences. We then abstract six main categories of metaphor according to the source domains of these keywords and calculate the percentage of each metaphor category in the corpus. Second, we delve into the variations in the percentage of each metaphor category across the six sub-corpora, as well as the variations in the percentages of some individual metaphors in their corresponding categories across these sub-corpora. Third, with the knowledge of the social context, we explore the underlying reasons for the above variations by analyzing the cross-domain mapping of metaphors in their conceptual system and the pragmatic functions of these metaphors in the context of China's political discourse. The findings demonstrate that the metaphors identified in the corpus can be classified into six categories, namely journey metaphors, building metaphors, war metaphors, plant metaphors, family metaphors and navigation metaphors. In the last three decades, the use of these metaphors experienced their existence and variation along with the social and political changes in China, among which the percentages of journey metaphors, building metaphors, and plant metaphors remained relatively unchanged over time while those of war metaphors, family metaphors and navigation metaphors underwent shifts in different degrees. Evidence also shows diachronic shifts occurred in the use of some individual metaphors belonging to the categories of journey metaphor and plant metaphor, such as advancing, step, and root.Through a further analysis of the conceptual mapping structures of these metaphors and their potential to arouse people's emotions, we find that, in order to effectively get its political opinions across, persuade the people to update their views in line with the social development, and unite them to participate in socialist construction at different times, the Party was restructuring the composition of these metaphors in accordance with the social transformation and development over the past three decades.This study may fill the gap in metaphor researches which failed to trace how the metaphor use changes in the course of social development. It also makes a contribution to the study of Chinese political metaphors which deserve much more attention, so as to help the people become more aware of Chinese political discourse and gain an in-depth understanding of the policies of the Party.