A Contrastive Analysis Of Frames In Trump’s And Obama’s Immigration Discourses

Immigration is always a hot issue in American social life.This thesis adopts the cognitive linguistic perspective to analyze the immigration discourses made by Trump and Obama on a theoretical basis of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Framing Theory.This thesis collects public speeches and remarks made by the two presidents during their presidential terms to form two corpuses,which include immigration speeches and remarks on Twitter made by Trump during 2017-2019,totaling 21,005 words and immigration speeches made by Obama during 2009-2017,totaling 20,100 words.The Framing Theory argues people think and reason through frames.Words and expressions evoke surface frames;surface frames evoke deep frames.Surface frames can be further divided into metaphorical and non-metaphorical surface frames.The Conceptual Metaphor Theory focuses on conceptual metaphors i.e.,cross-mapping between different domains.With the help of Ant Conc,this thesis analyzes metaphorical and non-metaphorical surface frames in Trump and Obama’s corpuses and explores their similarities and differences;it also discusses about deep frames in two corpuses.As for the extraction of surface frames,the non-metaphorical expressions of high frequency are directly extracted as non-metaphorical surface frames.The metaphorical expressions are first identified through MIP proposed by Pragglejaz Group(2007)and then classified as metaphorical surface frames.There are three major research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences between the dominant metaphorical surface frames in Trump’s and Obama’s immigration discourses?(2)What are the similarities and differences between dominant non-metaphorical surface frames in Trump’s and Obama’s immigration discourses?(3)What are the deep frames in Trump’s and Obama’s immigration discourses respectively?The findings are as follows:(1)The dominant metaphorical surface frames in Trump’s immigration discourses are the Container Frame,Liquid Frame,War Frame,Animal Frame,while major metaphorical surface frames in Obama’s include the Container,Journey,Construction,Machine and Clothing frames;the Container Frame displays high frequency in both corpuses;(2)Dominant non-metaphorical surface frames in Trump’s immigration discourses are Illegal Frame,Security Frame,Stop Frame,Enforcement Frame,Must Frame,Alien Frame,Danger Frame,and Justice Frame while major non-metaphorical surface frames in Obama’s are Illegal Frame,Enforcement Frame,Must Frame,Business Frame,Economy Frame,Create Frame,Coalition Frame,Together Frame,Opportunity Frame,Help Frame,Fair Frame,and Provide Frame;the Illegal Frame,Enforcement Frame and Must Frame display high frequency in both corpuses;(3)Distinct deep frames are evoked and strengthened in the two immigration discourses.The Immigrant Threat Frame,Violation of Sovereignty Frame and Non-human Immigrants Frame in Trump’s discourses work to legitimize the great border wall proposal and mass deportation of illegal immigrants.In sheer contrast,the Empathy Frame,Shared Prosperity Frame,and Broken Immigration System Frame in Obama’s discourses work to strengthen the empathy with immigrants and the promising future shared by Americans and immigrants;Obama also calls for cooperation from both parties to fix the obsolete immigration system to address the immigration issue.It noticed that the Immigrant Threat Frame and Violation of Sovereignty Frame are evoked in both immigration discourses to different extents.