Pragmatic Reasoning Of Political Metaphors In Donald Trump's Political Speeches

From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,metaphor is a way of thinking and experiencing the world,which can guide the way of thinking and persuade audiences to think as the speaker expected.Accordingly,it can be said that making an analysis on pragmatic reasoning of political metaphors can present how the hearer infers the speaker's political intentions by virtue of metaphorical implicature.Most researches center on the understanding and interpretation of political metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.However,there are few researches on pragmatic reasoning of political metaphors from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics.Moreover,in cognitive pragmatics,the researches on pragmatic reasoning of metaphors are mainly rooted in Relevance Theory(RT)in terms of implicature.As to the study of implicature,the core part of theory of conversational implicature proposed by Grice is co-operative principle.Grice insists that a speaker can obey or violate deliberately the rules of co-operative principle so that the hearer needs to derive conversational implicature implied in the speaker's words.In order to avoid Grice's circle,Sperber and Wilson distinguish two notions: implicature and explicature correspondingly.However,based on RT,the enrichment of semantic expression may give rise to a vicious circle again.Xu Shenghuan argues convincingly that Grice's circle lies in strict distinction between what is said and what is implicated.Following this,Xu Shenghuan has developed the notion of stereotypical relation proposed by Levinson into Stereotypical Relation Theory(SRT)to avoid circular inference.Accordingly,adopting both frameworks of Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)and SRT,this thesis purports to propose a pragmatic reasoning model of political metaphors to investigate metaphorical implicature of political metaphors in Donald Trump's political speeches.Meanwhile,in this thesis,we also seek to demonstrate the metaphorical implicature of each political metaphor in specific context aiming to answer the following three questions:(1)What political metaphors are generated from Donald Trump's political speeches?(2)How is the pragmatic reasoning of political metaphors in Donald Trump's political speeches carried out?(3)What metaphorical implicature is obtained by the hearer in terms of stereotypical relation and specific context? The major findings are as follows:Firstly,major source domains of political metaphors in Donald Trump's political speeches after his taking office are: PERSON,CONFLICT,CONTAINER,BUILDING,JOURNEY,COMPETITION,RELIGION,FAMILY,LIGHT and FIRE.With different contexts,the hearer derives different metaphorical implicature accordingly.Secondly,based on correlations or similarities between two domains,the stereotypical relation embedded in DOMAIN B can be mapped onto DOMAIN A to yield some blending stereotypical relation that can provide enrichment or explanation for explicit expression in order to get a relatively complete expression.Thirdly,according to different contexts,this thesis deduces specific particularized implicature on the basis of generalized implicature from the hearer's perspective.Cognitive pragmatics always pays much attention to pragmatic reasoning of conceptual metaphors rather than political metaphors.Therefore,adopting both CMT and SRT,this thesis presents a clear explanation on pragmatic reasoning of political metaphors on the basis of stereotypical relation in specific political metaphors.Meanwhile,it also provides a profound demonstration on different metaphorical implicature in terms of different contexts.From this perspective,it sheds some light on illustrating how the hearer derives metaphorical implicature so as to derive the speaker's political intentions from political metaphors.