A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And American Political Discourse

Metaphor has long been a hot topic for linguistic scholars. Traditionally, metaphor has been viewed as a pure linguistic phenomenon and studied as a rhetoric device. Contrary to the traditional view of metaphor, American linguists Lakoff and Johnson think that metaphor is not only a form of human language, but also a matter of human action and thought. Since Aristotle, there has been a vast amount of theoretical researches on metaphor from various perspectives. In recent decades, there have been some scholars studying political discourse from the perspective of metaphors, but rare attention has been paid to the contrastive study of conceptual metaphors in politics.Political discourse has always been considered to be bearing strong smell of politics and influenced by ideology. Therefore, it's usually abstract and hard for people to understand. Critical discourse analysis is mainly about the relationship between language, power and ideology. As this theory shows, language is the primary medium of practicing ideology and power, and metaphorical language is much more powerful.Based on the data, the present thesis attempts to apply conceptual metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis theory to make a contrastive study of metaphors in Chinese and American political discourse. The data used in this thesis are "The Report on the Work of the Government" by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in the year of 2006, and "The State of the Union Address" by American President George W. Bush in the year of 2006. Based on Lakoff's metaphor theory, the author attempts to identify conceptual metaphors employed in both of the data, find out their similarities and differences, and discuss the roles that conceptual metaphors play and the underlying ideologies behind the metaphors.The results are as follows: there are similar metaphors in both data: JOURNEY METAPHORS, WAR METAPHORS, CONSTRUCTION METAPHORS, FAMILY METAPHORS and ORGANISM METAPHORS. Conceptual metaphors that are unique to Chinese data are CHESS METAPHORS, MACHINE METAPHORS and CIRCLE METAPHORS, whereas RELIGION METAPHORS and BUSINESS METAPHORS are unique to American data. Although there are some similar conceptual metaphors in both data, their linguistic expressions are different. The similarities are mainly due to the common physical experience and perception of the world and the differences attribute to different social, political and cultural orientations. Moreover, the author finds out that metaphorical language is powerful in constructing ideologies. Whether Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao or American President Bush likes employing metaphor to express his own political thought and standpoints to persuade, infect and motivate people by means of mapping concrete familiar concepts onto abstract political concepts.