Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors In Political Discourse

Metaphor research has a long history,and scholars have studied metaphor from many dimensions.Lakoff & Johnson(1980)put forward Conceptual Metaphor theory and insist that metaphor is a systematic mapping from a specific conceptual domain to an abstract conceptual domain.Hereafter,metaphor research turns into cognitive era.Currently,the study of conceptual metaphor continues to expand.Critical Metaphor Analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to metaphor research proposed by Charteris-Black in 2004.Many researches on English metaphor have been done from this perspective.By contrast,few studies have ever been conducted to investigate Chinese political discourse.The annual Chinese Government Work Report is a concentrated expression of the will and thinking of the state leaders,which can timely and profoundly reflect the government's concept of governance and ideology.This thesis intends to combine conceptual metaphor theory with critical metaphor analysis theory to explore the types and functions of conceptual metaphors in Chinese Government Work Report.This thesis selects the Chinese Government Work Report(2013-2017)and builds a corpus of 90,263 Chinese characters.The thesis applies NLPIR/ICTALAS2015 and AntConc3.2.4 software to conduct a qualitative and quantitative study on Chinese Government Work Report(2013-2017).The types and functions of conceptual metaphors in the Chinese Government Work Report(2013-2017)will be analyzed and discussed.The analysis shows that there are seven types of conceptual metaphors in the Chinese Government Work Report(2013-2017).They are building metaphor,machine metaphor,journey metaphor,organism metaphor,water metaphor and family metaphor.Building metaphors,machine metaphors,and journey metaphors,which account for about 80% of the conceptual metaphors,are the dominant metaphors of the study.In addition,the study also shows that in revealing the government's hidden ideology and the idea of governing the country,conceptual metaphor has suchfunctions as dissemination,persuasion and emotion arousing.The application of metaphor enhances the expression of CGWR and helps the public to accept and understand the values and governing ideas of the government.This thesis studies the Chinese political discourse by combining conceptual metaphor theory and critical metaphorical analysis theory,which enriches and expands the applicable scope of Conceptual Metaphor theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis theory.At the same time,it may offer some potential strategies for learning and teaching politics as a subject in China and improve the reader's understanding of serious political discourse.