The Persuasive Function Of Metaphor

The establishment of conceptual metaphor theory symbolizes the emancipation from the bondage of traditional literature-and-rhetoric based metaphoric theories and the entry of evolutionary cognitive sciences. Metaphor has been acknowledged to be not only a figure of speech in the language, but also a unique approach to experience and comprehend one thing in terms of another. Human cognition always follows the developmental pattern from the near to the far, from the shallow to the deep, from the concrete to the abstract, from the known to the unknown, and the accumulation and advancement of cognition depends predominantly on the metaphor mechanism.Deeming that all metaphoric concepts are merely the inevitable entailments of primary experiential metaphors and largely ignoring those sociocultural parameters and their influence on conceptual incubation, cognitive linguistics tends to overemphasize universal cognitive operations shared by all human beings abstracted from certain contexts and impose neurobiological principles inflexibly onto the processes of metaphor production and interpretation, thus having made the blunder of reductionism. Concurrently, Critical Discourse Analysis can also be considerably enriched by taking cognitive parameters into account. Metaphoric expressions, as the medium to connect cognitive structures of discoursal fundamentals and unrevealed embedded ideologies, foregrounding some semantic features while backgrounding others, render the study of language choices with ideological characteristics more reliable. It is proven that the two strands are inherently complementary and should be combined to form a more influential probing torrent so as to achieve more explanatory power.It is posited that, in the process of identifying the distribution of conceptual metaphors, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, corpus linguistics and'scholarly intuition'should be tentatively combined so that all pertinent metaphorical usages can be included in the sphere of discussion, thus paving the way for further analysis of the sociocultural characteristics of metaphor.Among various figures of speech, metaphor is a fairly representative and effective persuasive strategy which can perfectly merge the understanding of human beings'common experiences in everyday life with sociocultural values that may invoke imbued strong emotions. It is asserted that, by means of resorting to common human experiences and social activities and establishing as much common ground as possible with the audience, metaphoric mechanism is the very bedrock and inexhaustible source for the speakers to transmit persuasive factors such as central beliefs, inner creeds and philosophical notions.On the basis of a collection of comparatively large corpora of"CCTV"Cup English Speaking Contest in which metaphors are prevalent and prominent, the dissertation assimilates Critical Discourse Analysis with cognitive linguistics, especially conceptual metaphor theory in an attempt to tentatively identify, analyze and interpret metaphor's vital persuasive function in public speech discourses with certain ideologies.