A Corpus-Based Study On Metaphorical Patterns In George.W.Bush’s And Barack Obama’s Educational Speeches

Educational speeches,as a vital type of speech,are floated with numerous metaphors which can be explored to find out the fundamental concepts of and attitudes towards education adopted by different parties,and to compare the education in two countries.Metaphor,as a cognitive method,not only influences human languages and behavior,but also reflects human thoughts and concepts.Research on metaphor has been developing since 1980,however,previous metaphor studies mainly focus on metaphors themselves rather than on thoughts,concepts,attitudes,and evaluation behind them.There are significant changes in research purposes and methods in recent metaphor studies,which are characterized by the integration of corpus approach with introspection,therefore the combination of corpus approach and introspection can be applied to the exploration on metaphor in educational speeches.This thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the dominant metaphorical patterns in George W.Bush’s and Barack Obama’s educational speeches with the combination of corpus approach and introspection as research method and educational speeches given by Bush and Obama from 2001 to 2016 as research data.Two corpora of educational speeches are respectively built and the total number of tokens in two corpora is similar.The Internet-based data analysis tool Wmatrix is used as research tools to identify metaphorical types by following Metaphor Identification Procedure.Three questions are put forward:(1)What dominant metaphorical patterns are in George W.Bush’s and Barack Obama’s educational speeches respectively?(2)What are similarities and differences of metaphorical patterns in two corpora?(3)What cause similarities and differences?With Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980)as the theoretical framework,this thesis makes a thorough and deep analysis of educational speeches given by Bush and Obama.The findings are as follows:(1)There are respectively six dominant metaphorical patterns in the two leaders’ educational speeches.In Corpus of Bush,dominant metaphorical patterns are journey,struggle,contest,war,investment,and sports and games metaphors,while journey,investment,contest,struggle,sports and games,and building metaphors are dominant metaphorical patterns in Obama’s educational speeches.(2)Both Bush and Obama use journey,struggle,contest,investment,and sports and games as source domains to talk about education;in addition,both of them use metaphor clusters in their speeches.Salient differences lie in four aspects:metaphorical patterns,metaphor productivity,conventionality and novelty,evaluation meaning.(3)Differences result from different moral models and government,namely Republican Party embraces Strict Father Model and the governing idea of "Small Government";while Democratic Party embraces Nurturant Parent Model and the governing idea of "Big Government".Besides,Bush uses metaphorical patterns to motivate.audiences with reference to negative effects,while Obama’s metaphorical patterns try to inspire audiences with reference to positive influences.This research not only explores dominant metaphorical patterns in educational speeches,but also makes a thorough and deep analysis of the discourse function and the motivation behind metaphors.This thesis also aims to give implications for relevant figures and researches on discourse in other fields,including sociology,psychology,and so on.