A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And English Presidential Speeches

Metaphor is a beyond-linguistic phenomenon. It is a universal way of thinking and acognitive instrument. Lakoff and Johnson claimed that “metaphors are pervasive in daily life,not just in language but in thought and action”(1980:3), and our conceptual system ismetaphorical in essence. Following their argument, political language is also metaphorical innature. By using metaphors, politicians conceptualize and express their thoughts and views.In the past decades, with the development of cognitive linguistics, more and morescholars have attempted to investigate political language from the perspective of conceptualmetaphors. But so far few contrastive studies have been made on the Chinese and the Englishpolitical languages in this respect. This thesis makes such an attempt by applying Lakoff andJohnson’s conceptual metaphor theory to the interpretation of Chinese and Americanpresidential speeches. The corpus is US-Sino top leaders’ public speeches and it spans aboutten years. Adopting qualitative, quantitative and contrastive methods, the purpose of thecontrastive analysis is to find out similarities and differences between them, explore theunderlying reasons, and reveal the functions of conceptual metaphors in political discourses.The results show:1) there are similar metaphors in US-Sino top leaders’ public speeches:journey metaphors, building metaphors, war metaphors, family metaphors, organismmetaphors and book metaphors.2) Circle metaphor is unique to the Chinese data, whilereligion metaphor is unique to the American data.3) Although there are some similarconceptual metaphors in Chinese and American data, their specific linguistic expressions aredifferent.4) The similarities are mainly due to the common physical experience andperception of the world. And the differences mainly result from different social, political andcultural orientations.5) Metaphorical language is powerful in constructing ideologies. BothChinese President and American President like to employ metaphors to express their own political ideas and standpoints to persuade, infect and motivate people by means of mappingconcrete familiar concepts onto the abstract political concepts.