Conceptual Metaphor Research Based On Corpus Analysis Tool Wmatrix

The research of political discourses has always been a momentous field of discourse analysis,which can be traced back to Aristotle period.And scholars have chiefly studied political discourses from the perspective of rhetoric,pragmatics or functional linguistics.Nevertheless,in recent decades,with the rise and development of cognitive linguistics and with the deeper and deeper study of conceptual metaphor,more and more scholars have begun to make extensive political discourses' researches in view of conceptual metaphor.For instance,Lakoff(1991)studies and summarizes metaphors concerning terrorism,family and war and so on in American political discourses.Through analyzing American political discourses,Howe(1988)concludes two major conceptual metaphors,namely,war metaphor and sports metaphor.The themes of political discourses mainly touch upon political election,economy and war,and so forth.However,a few of them pay attention to the political discourses which are about educational issues.Undoubtedly,faced with the increasingly fierce competition,a decent education is the necessity for both country and individuals.Therefore,politicians talk about education through publicizing political discourses,and they availably elaborate educational policies in the limited time,emphasizing the importance of education in order to arouse the enthusiasm of the public and win the support from the public.In view of that,this dissertation puts effort into studying the political discourses which are related to educational issues.What's more,in this thesis,educational parts in the political discourses are entitled educational discourses in political discourses.Owing to the obscure language in politics,metaphors take the fancy of politicians and become the carrier of thinking and ideology.Therefore,this thesis is based on conceptual metaphor theory raised by Lakoff and Johnson.Besides,since corpus analysis tool Wmatrix possesses the functions of producing semantic tagging and key semantic domain which can extract candidate keywords of conceptual metaphors to the maximum extent,the research selects Wmatrix as the research tool.Furthermore,in order to do a qualitative and quantitative study,metaphor identification standard respectively proposed by Charteris-Black(2004)and Pragglejaz Group(2007),semantic web WordNet and authoritative English dictionary Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English are also utilized in this thesis.All these nine discourses used in this research are from the American official website to ensure validity and reliability of the study,which are chiefly fallen into three types:the State of the Union Address whose parts are related to educational issues;speeches on education;commencement speeches to university students.There are altogether28,309 words in the self-constructed corpus.The aim of the thesis is to explore the uses of conceptual metaphors of educational discourses in American political discourses and to categorize and conclude those conceptual metaphors(CMs)on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory(CMT),and to discuss the functions of those CMs in educational discourses.Meanwhile,it attempts to demonstrate the important role of the online corpus analysis tool Wmatrix in the field of conceptual metaphor research.The research process and results show that Wmatrix's functions of producing semantic tagging and key semantic domain actually extract candidate keywords of conceptual metaphors to the maximum extent.In addition,the research shows that there are a large number of ontological metaphors,orientational metaphors and structural metaphors in educational discourses which belong to American political discourses,which mainly comprises human metaphor,entity metaphor,container metaphor,journey metaphor,game metaphor,investment metaphor and building metaphor.Among them,human metaphor and journey metaphor are the most frequently utilized.And there are three functions of those CMs and the persuasivefunction is the most momentous in educational discourses in American political discourses.Moreover,the combination of corpus-based method and introspective method can heighten the objectivity of the research;the educational discourses in American political discourses that the thesis mainly talks about could expand the field of political discourse studies.In the meantime,it can help English learners get a better understanding of educational discourses in American political discourses.