A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Chinese And American Presidential Speeches At Universities From The Perspective Of Critical Metaphor Analysis

Metaphor is a hot topic that has drawn many scholars’ attention, and it has become animportant branch of cognitive linguistics. Metaphor research has more than two thousand years’history. It is the traditional study of metaphor from Aristotle’s “comparison theory” to Richard’s“interaction theory”, takes metaphor as a kind of rhetorical device. The conceptual metaphortheory which proposed by Lakoff and Johnson put metaphor research into a new stage. They claimthat metaphor is not only a form of human language, but more importantly it is a universal way ofhuman action and thought. In recent years, more and more linguists have studied politicallanguage from the perspective of metaphor, but few have carried out the contrastive studies ofAmerican political language and Chinese political language from the perspective of conceptualmetaphor.Political discourse has strong political overtones, and politicians generally arouse people’spassion and gain their support by means of public speeches for certain purpose. However, politicalexpressions are abstract and difficult to understand, so politicians usually use the powerfullanguage instrument of conceptual metaphor to make audience understand and accept theirpolitical views. Based on previous research on metaphor, and on the basis of conceptual metaphortheory, this thesis adopts the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) to do contrastiveanalysis on American and Chinese political conceptual metaphor. The author trying to find thesimilarities and differences of the two corpora, and explore the reasons, as well as to discuss theconceptual metaphor’s main functions in presidential addresses.The corpus used in this thesis are adopted the addresses to university students given by theAmerican President Barack Obama and the Chinese former President Hu Jintao. During theresearch, quantitative and qualitative methods are all adopted. Data analysis shows that,conceptual metaphors exist in both American and Chinese political speeches, and it proves theuniversality of conceptual metaphor. The major classifications of conceptual metaphors inAmerican and Chinese data including Building Metaphors, Family Metaphors, Religion Metaphors,War Metaphors, Chess Metaphors, Journey Metaphors, Circle Metaphors, Plant Metaphors and so on. Among them, Building Metaphors, Family Metaphors and Plant Metaphors in both Chineseand American data and the metaphors which have the same source domain but of different targetdomain are Journey Metaphors and War Metaphors. Besides, Religion Metaphors are specific toAmerican data, while Chess Metaphors and Circle Metaphors are specific to Chinese data. Thesimilarities of metaphorical expressions are mainly due to the common cognitive system andphysical experience, while the differences attribute to different history, religion, ideology,tradition and custom in two countries. And it is summarized that there are five major functions ofconceptual metaphor in American and Chinese speeches, and persuasion is the main functionamong them.In this thesis, the author adopts the new method of critical discourse analysis—approach ofCritical Metaphor Analysis. In order to reveal the word groups’ beliefs, attitudes and emotions aswell as the ideology and the basis of rhetoric, It integrates the views of corpus analysis, cognitivelinguistics, contrastive analysis and pragmatics to analyze the conceptual metaphor. The results ofthis research may offer some help in further research of Chinese and American politics and culture,as well as the studies of political addresses translation. In foreign language teaching, it can helpstudents to master a comprehensively understanding of language. In the level of language research,this paper is a new attempt to study metaphor. However, this thesis is just an attempt to thecontrastive study on conceptual metaphor by the approach of CMA in the political speeches, thereare also many drawbacks. The author hopes that further researches about conceptual metaphor andCMA can be carried out in the near future.