Studies On Metaphor Scenarios In Public Discourse

In recent years, with the advancement of cognitive linguistics, many scholars have shown great interest in the research on conceptual structures. Andreas Musolff of Durham University(2006) proposes to use the category of"scenario", which he defines as a set of assumptions made by competent members of a discourse community about"typical"aspects of a source-situation, for example, its participants and their roles, the"dramatic"storylines and outcomes, and conventional evaluations of whether they count as successful or unsuccessful, normal or abnormal, permissible or illegitimate, etc. Professor Su of Nankai University (2007) claims that metaphors are scenarios. Metaphorical images are the best manifestations of our social experiences. We talk about and understand the world around us through these condensed or crystallized social experiences presented in the form of frames and scenarios.However, metaphors could be ideologically biased. They often carry a hidden cargo of assumptions from one domain of discourse to another. Moreover, the subtle implications of such domain assumptions are often embraced unconsciously and uncritically. Demagogues often abuse metaphors and analogies in public discourse, using them manipulatively in political and commercial messages to present one-sided or misleading simplifications of complex issues.The source scenarios of metaphors are an integral part of the"conceptual package"that is mapped onto the target concepts, allowing matching inferences about the participants and courses of action at the target level. These inferences are too richly loaded with encyclopedic and socioculturally mediated information to be deduced from general schematic domain structures.Thus metaphor scenario analysis is necessary to capture attitudinal preferences and discursive trends that are characteristic of particular discourse communities.So, based on the examination of the former studies concerning scenarios, the present paper intends to contribute to the metaphor scenario theory from the following perspectives:1. to explore the theoretical bases of metaphors as scenarios by analyzing the family and war scenarios.2. to probe into the epistemic elements in scenario building.3. to examine the epistemic functions of scenarios.4. to investigate the cultural restriction on metaphor scenarios.With Musolff (2006) and Su's (2007) metaphor scenario theories as theoretical basis, and with the help of Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor theory and Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Blending theory, the current study analyses the data collected from the English magazines and newspapers. It finds that to capture attitudinal preferences and discursive trends that are characteristic of particular discourse communities, we need to look beyond the domain-level and focus on specific scenarios and their argumentative uses. It is thus at the level of scenarios, rather than at general domain-level, that attitudinal biases and political preferences of discourse communities become discernible. The main reason for this seems to be that scenarios provide a sufficiently rich conceptual structure to be argumentatively and rhetorically exploitable. The analysis of metaphor scenarios in discourses can function as a future-prediction tool. Every individual or nation has a dominant conceptual metaphor about life, for metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Scenario analysis can also function as an uncertainty-coping method, or de-biasing device aimed to counter psychological biases, for it decomposes complexity into distinct states and present several alternative models. Scenarios are very effective devices dealing with biases of the human mind such as overconfidence, availability and anchoring.