A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of President Xi's Diplomatic Speeches Under The Belt And Road Initiative

Belt and Road Initiative is a national top-level cooperation initiative proposed by President Xi Jinping.It is committed to friendly unifying countries along the Belt and Road and jointly building a community of shared future for mankind.Many new concepts such as the “community of shared future for mankind” and “public goods” were created with the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative.To enhance people?s understanding of the new concepts of Belt and Road,Xi Jinping visited many countries and published a number of distinctive diplomatic speeches along the Belt and Road.From the perspective of pragmatics,metaphor can evoke the emotions of the audience,and thus better fulfill the function of persuasion.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,conceptual metaphor is a cognitive tool that helps people to understand abstract and unfamiliar concepts.The critical metaphor analysis proposed by Charteris-Blake is a combination of pragmatics,cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis approaches to metaphor.It aims to reveal the hidden ideologies of the language users by three steps: namely metaphor interpretation and metaphor.This thesis conducted a Critical Metaphor Analysis of Xi Jinping's 25 diplomatic speeches under the Belt and Road Initiativewith the help of corpus tools.The goal of the thesis is to explore how Xi Jinping conveys new concepts and intentions through metaphors in diplomatic speeches,thus inspiring major media how to tell Chinese story.The research results present as follows:There are mainly four conceptual metaphors in Xi Jinping?s diplomatic speech under Belt and Road Initiative,which are conventional metaphors(the percentage of resonance is larger than 5%),namely: intimate metaphor(36.71%),journey metaphor(33.83%),human body metaphor(13.56%)and construction metaphor(11.18%).Intimate metaphor is used to narrow the psychological distance of the people along the Belt and Road countries;Journey metaphor encourages countries along the Belt and Road to move forward and explore the bright future with join hands.Human metaphor establishes a national image as a country fulfilling its responsibility with determination;Construction metaphor explains that Belt and Road is a long-term process that requires the joint efforts of all countries along Belt and Road.