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

Metaphor has been studied for thousands of years, and has been one of the hot topics for linguists since the time of Aristotle. In the traditional western researches, metaphor is considered as a rhetorical device; however, since 1980s, the studies on metaphor have been taken under the approach of cognitive psychology. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published the book Metaphors We Live By, in which the basic framework of modern cognitive research on metaphor has been formed. It freed metaphor research from the traditional rhetorical perspective, and led the research of metaphor into cognitive field. According to Lakoff's theory, metaphor does not just exist on language level, but is pervasive in our thought and action. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.The study of political languages also has a long history, but most of it is taken from the perspective of rhetoric and pragmatics. In the past decades, with the development of cognitive science, a great number of scholars studied political languages from the perspective of metaphor. For example, Lakoff has made some researches on contemporary American political metaphors, such as metaphors of terrorism, metaphors in foreign affairs, etc. However, there are few contrastive studies on metaphors in Chinese and American political discourses.This thesis applies the theory of conceptual metaphor in the study of political discourses, and based on related corpus, a contrastive analysis about political conceptual metaphor is preceded. The corpus used in this thesis are the public speeches delivered by Chinese president Hu Jintao and American former president George W. Bush and present president Barack Obama from 2005 to 2010. In this thesis the Critical Metaphor Analysis is adopted, which is proposed by (?)arteris-Black. It includes three stages:metaphor identification, metaphor (?)rpretation and metaphor explanation. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study, and the latter is dominant. Through the analysis, the major conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourses are found out:War Metaphors, Journey Metaphors, Construction Metaphors, Family Metaphors and Circle Metaphors; and the major conceptual metaphors in American political discourses are Family Metaphors, Journey Metaphors, Construction Metaphors, Human Metaphors and Drama Metaphors. There are some similar metaphors in Chinese and American political discourses:Family Metaphors, Journey Metaphors and Construction Metaphors; but their contents vary a little. War Metaphors and Circle Metaphors are particular to Chinese corpus, while Human Metaphors and Drama Metaphors are particular to American corpus. From the aspects of religion, history and image, the basis of conceptual metaphors has been discussed respectively.The result of this research may shed some light on further understanding of Chinese and American political languages, which is helpful for the further study and communication in Chinese and American politics, and Chinese and American culture as well. It may also offer some help in English education:it can help the Chinese student have a further understanding of Chinese and American culture and a more thorough command of English.