A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor And Ideology In Political Discourse

Metaphor has been described as a central tool of our cognitive apparatus. It is central to our understanding of how language, thought and discourse are structured. The role of metaphor in language has been a focus of considerable interest in linguistics and other fields since the pioneering work of Lakoff and Johnson Metaphor We live by (1980) .Afterward, Conceptual metaphor analysis was soon introduced into political discourse analysis by Lakoff (2002) . He maintains that conceptual metaphor analysis tate as an analytical tool to elucidate the underlying ideology and values in political discourse and he postulates two systemic models, namely STRICT FATHER FAMILY and NURTURANT PARENT FAMILY, under which conservative and liberal parties operate their particular metaphorical party thought respectively. Enlightened by the methodology used by Lakoff, this study intends to expand conceptual metaphor analysis into comparative political study of different nations.So adopting a broadly cognitive linguistic approach, this research uses conceptual metaphor analysis to compare editorials and opinion articles from newspaper websites in the US, UK and China. The study sets out with two aims: firstly, to reveal the underlying political ideologies of the writers and explore whether evidence can be found to support the hypothesis by Lakoff (2002) that based on the ideal family, two fundamental systems of morality underlie two conflicting world views; and secondly, to compare the western and non-western corpora in order to explore to which extend the use of conceptual metaphor analysis may reveal conflicting political ideology between the two "worlds" and within China cultural values.Lakoff s use of conceptual metaphor analysis into political discourse analysis is highly general, which may overlook the actual linguistic realization of metaphors in texts. Consequently, in order to complement conceptual metaphor analysis, the writer adopted critical discourse analysis in this study as well.Three pairs of corpus were collected from six websites, which can represent typical party voices. The six websites are: Fox News and LA times in USA; Guardian and Daily Telegraph in UK; The People and Taiwan News in China.The study found some support for the existence of these models in western corpora, though US corpus is more strident with the models than UK corpus. And several metaphors were identified in the Chinese corpora suggestive of conflicting political ideology and Chinese values. Different prioritized values between western and nonwestern corpora are also identified accompanied with underlying shared values.It was found that complementing conceptual metaphor analysis with aspects of critical discourse analysis formed a powerful tool for this research.