A Cognitive Study Of Metaphor Icai Coherence In Political Discourse

Metaphor has been considered as a rhetorical device in the long period of time.Since then, the focus has been on lexical and syntactic level while neglectingexploring its discourse function from cognitive perspective. The book Metaphors WeLive by, written by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 is the breakthrough for metaphorstudy, in which they proposed conceptual metaphor theory and brought metaphorstudy into cognitive period. Since then, metaphor is no longer considered as languagephenomenon, but a thinking pattern or cognition mechanism with its principles to helpto construct cognitive world.Every conceptual metaphor includes two parts,“source domain and targetdomain.”Its working mechanism is mapping from source domain to target domain. Inmetaphorical expressions, either one, or both domains appeared. That is to say, eitherof them can be manifested in language level. Behind one metaphorical expression,there may be one, two even three conceptual metaphors.Discourse coherence has been the topic in discourse analysis. The previousstudies on discourse from semantic and pragmatic perspective give us help for furtherstudy. Based on socio-cognitive model, we classify mapping into three types:experiential mapping, interpersonal mapping and textual mapping.On the basis of conceptual metaphor and coherence theory, this thesis aims toexplore the metaphorical coherence in political discourse, especially in presidents’inaugural addresses. Through analysis and discussion, the author finds that the discourse coherence can be achieved by conceptual metaphor. What’s more, metaphorplays an important role in political discourse. Metaphorical expressions are persuasiveand encouraging.Through the analysis and exploration of the collected data, we find that metaphoris not only a traditional rhetorical device, but also a cognitive model. Besides, we findthat coherence not only occurs on the language level, but also in the cultural contextbetween the speakers and receivers.For the reason of sample size of this study, its findings should be consideredtentative and should be interpreted with caution. The author wishes it would shed lighton the significance of metaphor in political discourses.