A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Chinese Political Discourse

Metaphor is a way of thinking as well as a rhetorical device.Conceptual metaphor makes study of metaphor turn to the cognitive field,and metaphor research from the cognitive perspective has increasingly become a hot topic in many fields.Metaphor research in political discourse is no exception.In political discourse,it can be seen that language and politics are interconnected in essence,and language is the carrier of politics.The fundamental purpose of political discourse is to use language to promote public participation in public affairs and the social transformation of the country.However,it can also be noticed that most of existing studies are mainly based on Western political discourse while fewer studies have once been carried on to research Chinese political discourse.The Government Work Report is a kind of typical political discourse,which can timely and profoundly reflect the government’s governing philosophy and ideology.This thesis uses Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory,combined with Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA)proposed by Charteris-Black,as the theoretical framework,aiming to probe into the types of conceptual metaphors in the Chinese Government Work Reports(hereafter,CGWR in short)(2017-2019)and explore political philosophy behind them and functions of conceptual metaphors.This thesis selects the CGWR(2017-2019)and builds a corpus.In addition,the process of metaphor identification in this thesis combines CMA raised by Charteris-Black(2004)and MIP(Metaphor Identification Procedure)advanced by Pragglejaz Group(2007).Ant Conc3.5.8 software and the online automatic system in database for segmenting word and tagging part-of-speech are also utilized in this thesis.Detailed analysis shows that there are mainly eight types of conceptual metaphors in the CGWR(2017-2019).Specifically,eight types of metaphor include machine metaphor,organism metaphor,building metaphor,journey metaphor,war metaphor,stuff metaphor,water metaphor and container metaphor.Machine metaphors,Organism metaphors and Building metaphors,which take over near 72 percentage of all the conceptual metaphors,are the dominant metaphors of the study.In addition,the study also shows that in the CGWR(2017-2019),conceptual metaphors have such functions as persuasion,emotion arousing,and information selection in revealing the government’s the concept of running the state and ideology behind.The application of metaphor makes the serious political discourse easy to be understood and enhances the relationship between the government and the people.The thesis that research a lot over Chinese political discourse,namely,the CGWR(2017-2019),enlarges and extends the range of the theory,thus illustrating the great explanatory power of conceptual metaphor in Chinese political discourse.It further proves that conceptual metaphor plays an essential part in the persuasion and propagation of political discourse.