A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of New Year’s Day Messages From The Chinese And U.S Presidents

In1980, Lakoff and Johnson comprehended metaphor from a cognitive angle inMetaphors We Live By, making a breakthrough in that they shift the scope of themetaphor research from linguistic system to human conception. The cognitive view ofmetaphor’s conceptual nature subsequently arouses many linguists’ attention andaccelerates their steps into cognitive field. Charteris-Black (2004) further proposed anew theoretical framework for metaphor analysis, namely Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA for short). Through the integrated use of critical discourse analysis, corpuslinguistics, cognitive linguistics and pragmatic linguistics, CMA investigates therelations between metaphors and the context around them, unveiling the underlyingideological functions and social and cultural factors.Despite some researches on metaphors conducted in Chinese and Englishpolitical discourses through the utilization of CMA, much emphasis has been laid onthe issues of political party, presidential inaugural speech and political policy, withlittle attention to presidential New Year’s Day message. As an important form ofpolitical speech, the presidential New Year’s Day message is of significance in that itnot only conveys greetings and wishes but also touches on many subjects includingthe economic state, well-being issue and security matters.Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the combination of quantitativeand qualitative analysis, through a comparative and contrastive analysis of themetaphors in New Year’s Day messages by Chinese and American Presidents withinrecent ten years, the study adopts the Critical Metaphor Approach, that is, metaphoridentification, metaphor interpretation, and metaphor explanation, to carry out a comparative and contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in the data of thetwo nations’ presidential speeches.The study has solved two major problems:(1) discovered the typical conceptualmetaphors in each of the data;(2) generalized the similarities and differences of theconceptual metaphors in the data and uncovered the underlying factors of them fromthe perspective of embodied philosophy and social context.The comparative and contrastive study shows that: on the one hand, thesimilarities of the conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese New Year’s Daymessages derive from the experiential bases of metaphorical concepts rather than acoincidence. Since all human beings like Americans and the Chinese share a lot ofsame or similar embodied experiences that human cognition is rooted in, it is notsurprising that people from different nations share numerous similar conceptualstructures; on the other hand, people’s linguistic patterns, cultural assumptions andindividual worldviews have strongly impacted on their thinking modes so thatdifferent characteristics exist in the respective metaphorical cognition of the Englishand Chinese political leaders’ language. Therefore, people from different culturalenvironments use different conceptual metaphors to categorize and conceptualize theworld.