| Research on environmental issues has become a pan-disciplinary topic. Accordingly, the scholars of different disciplines are looking for different ways to prevent further deterioration of ecological environment. Since the 1960s, different approaches of studying language and ecology had been merged and thus formed varied research methods of the unified thought, namely, protecting the environment, such as ecological literature, ecocriticism and ecolinguistics. However, previous studies tended to focus more on language itself, and less on the thought behind the language and the receiver’s emotions. Therefore, the combination of ecology and cognitive linguistics is a new approach to the study of environmental discourses which is more scientific and effective.This thesis makes a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors, frames and grammatical metaphors in George. W. Bush and Barack Obama’s speeches on environmental issues with the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The Republican corpus of Bush includes excerpts of SOTUAs (2001-2008) on environment and 4 speeches with 16,774 words. Since Obama’s each speech is shorter than that of Bush’s, in order to ensure the equal word count of each corpus, the Democratic corpus of Obama contains 6 speeches and excerpts of SOTUAs (2009-2016) on environment with 16,762 words.This thesis adopts the methodology of metaphorical analysis proposed by Pragglejaz Group (2007) and Charteris-Black (2004) and the concept of "the resonance of source domain" proposed by Charteris-Black (2004) and puts forward the following four questions:(1)What are the typical conceptual metaphors and frames used in Bush and Obama’s speeches?(2)What are the ideology and cognitive motivations behind the speakers’ framing choices respectively?(3)What are the dominant grammatical metaphors used in Bush and Obama’s excerpts of SOTUAs?(4)What are the motivations and logical thinking behind the speakers’ uses of grammatical metaphors?Within the theoretical framework of Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Lakoff s (2002,2004,2008) Framing Theory and Halliday’s (1985a) Grammatical Metaphor Theory, this thesis makes an in-depth analysis of the environmental discourses of Bush and Obama. The major findings are as follows:(1) both Bush and Obama employ the same source domains in their discourses, namely, "journey metaphor, conflict metaphor, contest metaphor, commodity metaphor and building metaphor". However, frames used in Bush’s discourses are "journey frame, independence frame, security frame and market frame", while those in Obama’s discourses are "empathy frame, cooperation frame, responsibility frame, future frame and commodity frame"; (2) due to the moralities systems of the two U.S. parties, the differences of framing motivations exist in the two corpora:the conservative moral system of the Republican Party includes numerous ideas that go against environmentalism and against dealing with climate change, while the progressive moral system of the Democratic Party insists on protecting the environment and regards the government as a necessity to improve the environmental conditions; (3) in grammatical metaphor analysis, both Bush and Obama prefer to put the words "environment" and "climate" in the position of object or modifier rather than subject; (4) the use of grammatical metaphor may indicate that both the Democrats and the Republicans prefer to treat the environment as the target to be protected rather than an agent in the subject position.This research is not a pure analysis of language but an in-depth analysis which reveals the strong persuasive function and explanatory power of conceptual metaphors and frames on political discourses. Therefore, this thesis can provide a reference and theoretical guidance for politicians, journalists or environmentalists to construct political discourses when publicizing their environmental protection policies in our country. |
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