Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors In Political Discourse From Attitude-based Blending Theory Model

In modern times, political appeals are generally achieved by means of language, which language can never be reached separated from metaphor. As an extremely representative and highly effective strategy for persuasion and inspiration, metaphor has long been heavily used by politicians. Hence, the study of metaphor in political discourse is of the utmost importance. Concerning the working mechanism, some researches have been done from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which is applicable to explain the conventional metaphorical expressions in higher entrenchment, but deficient on the novel expressions. Then, this problem was kind of solved by the emergence of Conceptual Blending Theory, which bears a strong explanatory power in the interpretation of innovative meaning construction of the real-time, but gives no explanation on how to properly make the choice and gain the commonality within the two input spaces, which shows more shortness when it comes to political metaphors. As is known in political discourse, speakers are under especially more influences, such as international relations, different ideologies and values, and so on, they will become more cautious of the choice of words and building of sentence, with which their attitudes and evaluations toward the stated events are filled. Therefore, on the basis of CBT, supplemented by attitude system, this paper tries to put forward Attitude-based Blending Theory model, to mend up the shortness of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory when explaining metaphors in political discourse.Taking Chinese president Xi Jinping’s international speeches whose target audience are mainly African and Asian people or organizations, from http://www.people.com.cn from April, 2013 to March, 2015, as the source of corpus, this paper collects nineteen pieces, 68,482 words in total. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to analyze conceptual metaphors in the political speeches. Qualitative judgments are initially necessary to identify conceptual metaphors. Through the analysis of the speeches, 1,171 conceptual metaphors are found, mainly including 467 organism metaphors, 194 construction metaphors, 170 journey metaphors, 91 family metaphors, 75 machine metaphors, 69 water metaphors, 52 study metaphors, 14 war metaphors and 8 weather metaphors. In this article, Attitude-based Blending Theory model is applied to qualitatively interpret the nine kinds of metaphors, in order to reveal the functions and working mechanism of metaphors in political discourse, which reflects the characteristics of thinking, ideology and values of Chinese people. It is found that the nine kinds of metaphors constitute a system working around two main lines, namely the realization of the Chinese Dream at home and the achievement of Community of Common Destiny abroad, which successfully delivers the idea that Chinese people are willing to make contributions to the building of a harmonious and better world.