A Three-dimensional Analysis Of Metaphors In Political Discourse

Over the past few decades, the focus of metaphor research has shifted from lexical ornament to cognitive reconstruction of the reality, even recently to discoursal level. It has been recognized that metaphors play a central role in public discourse, especially in truly political discourse, which is mostly persuasive and rhetorical in nature. The application of metaphors intensifies its persuasiveness through shaping or rebuilding the structure of political categorization and argumentation. Although the significance of metaphors in the analysis of discourse comprehension has gained popular attention, most of the current research is still confined in the linguistically figurative function of metaphors in discourse. Consequently, the cognitive and pragmatic properties of metaphors in discourse can be ignored so that the study is slightly unreliable and unsatisfactory. This paper examined the use of metaphors and explained their persuasiveness in two selected speeches of present American president Barack Obama from three dimensions, namely linguistics, cognition and pragmatics.The analysis of metaphors in this paper was conducted using Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and Fairclough’s (1995) and van Dijk’s (1993b) critical discourse analysis (CDA). Results showed that in political discourse, seven conceptual metaphors are mainly adopted but there exist many differences among them, and the use of metaphors in political discourse is a composite choice after integrating linguistics, cognition and pragmatics. Implications of the paper cannot only reaffirm the closely intertwined relationship among language, cognition and society or culture, but suggest that political practitioners dealing with political texts or discourses either in teaching, translation and reporting should be aware of the three dimensions of metaphors.