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

Metaphor, as a form of language, has been attracting attention of international scholars foryears with a long history of more than two thousand years since Aristotle. However, in1980, thepublication of Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson symbolizes a higher level ofmetaphor research, which means a pretty major leap from the perspective of rhetorical functionto that of cognitive function of metaphor. In other words, Lakoff advocates probing intometaphor as a sort of cognitive means and thinking mode.In the era that highlights democracy and civilization, politicians tend to deliver publicpolitical speeches in order to arouse the masses’ passions and to win the audience’s support,aiming at publicizing their own political views. Nevertheless, the fact that political language isquite abstract and dull with a strong political color and hidden ideology makes it difficult for theaudience to understand. As a consequence, the vivid metaphors are favored by the politicians,thus becoming the carrier of ideology. From this point, the metaphors in political discourses arenot descriptions of the objective world but a reflection of the political bias and political views ofthe politicians. Politicians attempt to realize their political aims through exerting influence on theaudience’s comprehension and perception, as well as making effect on their ideologies andattitudes. The studies on the conceptual metaphors in political discourses contribute to people’sbetter understanding of the underlying ideology and values of the metaphors and a moreprofound comprehension of the speaker’s political ideas and aims.The data in this study are from ten political discourses of Chinese incumbent president XiJinping and American incumbent president Barack Obama. On the basis of Lakoff’s ConceptualMetaphor Theory and by means of Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis, this thesismakes a comparative analysis of the dominant conceptual metaphors in both Chinese andAmerican speeches, aiming to find out the similarities and differences, to expound the social andcultural basis, and to elaborate the functions of conceptual metaphors used in political speeches.The study shows that conceptual metaphors are pervasive both in Chinese politicaldiscourses and American political discourses, which proves the universality of conceptualmetaphors. In addition, the dominant conceptual metaphors in Chinese data turn out to be journey metaphor, war metaphor, building metaphor, family metaphor and circle metaphor andso on; while the main conceptual metaphors in American corpus come out to be journeymetaphor, war metaphor, building metaphor, family metaphor and religion metaphor, etc.Moreover, the commonly used conceptual metaphors are building metaphor and family metaphor;while as to journey metaphor and war metaphor, it is similar in the source domain but different inthe target domain. Additionally, the circle metaphor is unique to the Chinese data while thereligion metaphor to the American data. Through the contrastive analysis, the similarity ofmetaphor application is rooted in people’s similar perception and experience about the outsideworld, while the difference results from the different social cultures between China and America,that is, the difference in history, tradition, ideology and religion. In addition, metaphors have fivefunctions in political discourses, among which the persuasion is the main function.The Critical Metaphor Analysis adopted in this study is regarded as a new approach thatintegrates corpus linguistics, cognitive semantics, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis.Through a comparative analysis of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American politicaldiscourses, the implicit ideology and social basis can be revealed, which may contribute toChinese students’ better understanding of American culture so as to promote the cross-culturalcommunication, provide reference for the translation study of political discourses, and benefitthe foreign language teaching in China, especially vocabulary teaching, by means of explainingthe metaphorical expressions in discourses.