A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Xi Jinping’s Anti-corruption Discourse From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

As a kind of political discourse,anti-corruption discourse,born out of the fight against corruption,has a strong purpose and publicity.Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse has a unique language style containing a large number of conceptual metaphors.This paper analyzes conceptual metaphors in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse and explores the classifications,distributional characteristics and functions of conceptual metaphors in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse,which is of great significance in theory and practice.Conceptual Metaphor Theory is put forward by Lakoff and Johnson(1980).Conceptual metaphor theory holds that conceptual metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a way of thinking for human beings to understand the world.Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and a systematic cross-domain mapping.This theory studies metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,breaking through the traditional study on metaphor from rhetorical perspective.The corpus of this paper consists of the 61 Chinese speeches by Xi Jinping from2017 to 2020 on the main content of anti-corruption from China Daily and Xinhua net.This study uses the Metaphor Identification Procedure proposed by Pragglejaz Group(2007)to identify metaphors in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse.This paper takes the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis and adopts the concept of resonance of source domain proposed by Charteris-Black(2004)to count the types,tokens and resonance of keywords in different conceptual metaphor modes.This study attempts to answer the following three research questions:(1)What modes of conceptual metaphor does Xi Jinping employ in his anti-corruption discourse?(2)What are the distributional features of conceptual metaphor in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse?(3)What are the functions of conceptual metaphors in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse?The study draws the following conclusions.Firstly,Xi uses a large number of conceptual metaphors in his anti-corruption discourse including 972 metaphorical expressions and 21 modes of conceptual metaphor.Secondly,the conceptual metaphors in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse are mainly structural metaphors.The most frequently used metaphors in structural metaphor are organism metaphors,war metaphors and disease metaphors with the resonance of 7750,5616 and 2850,accounting for 32.62%,23.64% and 12% respectively.Thirdly,the functions of conceptual metaphors in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption discourse include cognitive function,rhetoric function,social cultural function and pragmatic function.This paper not only enriches the empirical study of conceptual metaphor,but also provides a new direction for the analysis of political discourse from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.The research of this paper also helps readers better understand the anti-corruption discourse.