A Study On Conceptual Metaphor In Anti-corruption Discourse

Conceptual metaphor is commonly used in different areas,including political discourse.In fact,recent years has witnessed an extensive research on conceptual metaphor in political discourse.However,most of these studies have mainly focused on leaders? speeches,government report,news discourse etc.,and few studies have been conducted in classification and application of conceptual metaphor in anti-corruption discourse.This thesis uses the Lakoff?s conceptual metaphor as theoretical framework and analyzes the corpus related to anti-corruption.It attempts to explore the dominant conceptual metaphors in anti-corruption discourse,their distributions and pragmatic functions in the context.To answer these questions,The author took Fighting Corruption,How the CPC Works as the data sources and qualitative analysis as the research method for this study.Firstly,the author identified conceptual metaphors in different forms by manual way and classified them according to the categories of conceptual metaphor.Secondly,the author built a preliminary statistics based on classification and then described the metaphorical expressions according to the data.After the data analysis,the study has come up to the following conclusions:Firstly,there are a large number of metaphorical expressions in the book.Of all these metaphors,ontological metaphor takes the largest share,accounting for almost half of the total.It is followed by structural metaphor(38.82%)and the orientation metaphor(13.02%).In ontological metaphor,entity metaphor has the largest number,occupying for 65.31%,followed by container metaphor for 23.98%.In structural metaphor,war metaphor and disease metaphor account for 25.32% and 13.29% respectively.In orientational metaphor,"up" and "down" are most frequently used realizations.Secondly,metaphorical expression plays an important role in making abstract language concrete,persuasive and motivation function.The political language is abstract and difficult to understand,so conceptual metaphor can help audience better understand the anti-corruption language and anti-corruption phenomenon.It helps to improve their analytical and appreciative ability.Since conceptual metaphor can reflect politicians? intentions and further influence people's judgment and behavior,politicians often choose different metaphorical expressions to deliver their ideology for persuading people to support their political views.Besides,conceptual metaphor also can provide movitation for some behavior in thought.In anti-corruption discourse,it can effectively stimulate people's determination and will of eliminating corruption by presenting serious consequences of corruption.This study not only proves the universality and systematicness of conceptual metaphor and enriches its applied scope,but also concludes the dominant conceptual metaphors in anti-corruption discourse and analyzes their pragmatic funtions from the perspective of language.The author hope that this study can both enlighten for further studies on conceptual metaphor in anti-corruption discourse and benefit for readers of anti-corruption discourse.