A Diachronic Analysis Of Metaphor Clusters In Chinese And American Leaders’ Political Speeches

Metaphor has been a focus of linguistic researches for a long time. Traditional metaphor theory regarded metaphor as a means of rhetorical device, later the development of metaphor studies entered a semantic and pragmatic period. However, these studies on metaphor have been confined in linguistic categories. In 1980, the publication of Metaphor We Live By paved a new way to metaphor research. Lakoff and Johnson hold that metaphor is pervasive in daily life and is a kind of a cognitive means. From then on, metaphor research entered a new stage of multidisciplinary development; the study of metaphor in political discourse also started.Political discourse bears strong political complexion which is too complex and abstract to be experienced directly by ordinary people. It is noticed that metaphor could make political language easier to be comprehended. Thus, more and more scholars began to focus on the study of metaphor in political discourse. However, most of them paid attention to the contrastive study of single metaphor phenomenon; the diachronic studies of a series of metaphors in daily language, still remained few.This paper attempts to make a diachronic analysis of metaphor clusters in American and Chinese political discourse. The data employed in this research are American and Chinese leaders’ political speeches addressed to university students. Chinese corpus contains 119021 characters and American corpus includes 118805 characters. This research is implemented under three periods, namely before 1900, from 1900 to 2010, from 2010 up to now, in which the new term “metaphor clusters” is introduced to study the clustering phenomena of metaphors in different periods. In addition, both qualitative analysis and qualitative analysis are employed in this paper. Language linguistic analysis tool, Wmatrix and MIPVU procedure are adopted to identify metaphor cluster, which remedies the shortcoming of traditional method to identify metaphor through researchers’ intuition and perception, the qualitative analysis is adopted to conduct a contrastive analysis of dominant metaphor clusters and lecturers’ using tendency in American and Chinese corpuses.Data analysis manifests that metaphor clusters abound in American and Chinese leaders’ political speeches in universities. Generally speaking, Chinese leaders adopt more metaphor clusters than American leaders in their speeches. The similar metaphor clusters in both data are: journey metaphor clusters, family metaphor clusters and building metaphor clusters, etc. Circle metaphor and art metaphor clusters are unique to Chinese data, while religion metaphor and drama metaphor clusters are unique to American data. Before 1990, leaders adopted few metaphor clusters in America and China, the twenty years from 1990 to 2010 witnessed a peak season of employing metaphor clusters in Chinese and American leader’s speeches, after 2010, the usage of metaphor clusters in Chinese data has ushered a new stage of development, a mass of new metaphorical expressions bearing cultural connation appeared. The results reveal that the differences in the usage of metaphor clusters are mainly due to various ideologies and cultural backgrounds of the two countries. In addition, our analysis also shows that the employment of metaphor clusters in political discourse could lead the audiences’ thinking direction, reduce the audiences’ comprehensive burden and arouse the audiences’ emotion.This research breaches the shackles of traditional metaphor study by introducing new research unit and conducting a diachronic research of Chinese and American leaders’ political speeches in campuses, which is not only an attempt of a novel method of metaphor research, but also provides some implications with cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching.