A Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese Political Discourse

In the 1980's, Lakoff & Johnson completed what be called the"cognitive turn"4 with the landmark publication of The Metaphor We Live By. 5According to this theory, Metaphor is not only a metaphorical tool but also an important cognitive mechanism. As the forerunner of this theory, Lakoff elaborated the working of conceptual metaphor and then applied it to the study of American political discourse, elucidating the underlying ideology and value of American society. However, the study mentioned above is only limited in the American political discourse, we have not done systematic research besides western culture. According to the cognitive theory , we can infer that Chinese political discourse entails its own metaphorical system because body experiences differ due to the culture and social condition. This thesis is aimed at exploring the conceptual metaphorical system in Chinese political discourse.The theoretical framework of this thesis is the conceptual metaphor theory and the language theory in critical discourse analysis in order to reveal the political ideology and Chinese cultural values. As far as the content is concerned , the author aims at answering three questions: 1)What are the typical conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourse? 2)How do this metaphors realize their mapping process from source domain to target domain? 3) What is the cognitive basis and function of the conceptual metaphor?The thesis selects 49 political lectures of government leaders which published in People's Daily as the corpus, and adopts methods of combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to reveal the conceptual metaphors in the corpus.The results of my study show that in Chinese political discourse, there are ten typical conceptual metaphors. Among them, journey metaphor is the most frequent one in occurrences, followed by conceptual metaphors patterns of as journey organism metaphor, family metaphor, current metaphor and war metaphor. Then the author illustrates the mapping process of the above conceptual process and use SPSS to see which metaphorical expression is most related to the conceptual metaphor. Finally, the thesis reveals the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourse.The study confirms the validity of the conceptual metaphor theory and may offer help for the learning of Chinese as a second language, providing some hints for the contrastive linguistics and communication across culture.