A Study Of Political Metaphor In American Presidents’ Speeches

Political speech has been an important genre in political literature in the west. American presidents’ address has been a typical register, and plays an important role in the political life of the states. As the leader of a country, to propagandize the government policies, the president has to give public speech at home and abroad in different situations to persuade the audiences to receive his ideas. By using metaphor, the sophisticated political idea systems can be understood in a simple way, or the ways which are familiar with. To ordinary audiences, politics is abstract, so the use of metaphor can make it easier to be absorbed. In the case of particular situation, politicians need to choose special and impressive metaphorical expressions.Metaphor exists everywhere in people’s communication. The earliest study of metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle. Later on, more and more researchers become intersted in metaphor. At the beginning, metaphor is treated as a rhetoric device, while in the field of cognitive linguistics, which is a rising field in recent years scholars consider metaphor not only as a figure of speech, but also as a cognitive behavior for human beings. Metaphor is an important cognitive mechanism and mental method for people to express and exchange their ideas. Especially in the real social communication, people commonly understand one abstract concept by using another relatively more concrete object. In the long history of metaphor researching, the western research is earlier than that in China. Western scholars have developed five main theories about metaphor:Substitution Theory, Comparison Theory, Interaction Theory, and Mapping theory. And the fifth theory is Conceptual Blending Theory. These ideas will be described fully in literature review. Conceptual Blending Theory is developed in recent years by Fauconnier&Turner in1996. And it is the development of Mental Space Theory based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Conceptual Blending Theory has a close relationship with conceptual metaphor but also has differences. The proposing of this theory provides a theoretical base for understanding the construction and reading of on-line metaphor meaning.In this thesis qualitative analysis is applied. About80political speeches from24American presidents are analyzed and then metaphors that appear in these political speeches are classified. Five main types of metaphors are discovered based on the types of sources domain that are used in the metaphor. The five types of metaphors are:human metaphor, journey metaphor, war metaphor, family metaphor and building metaphor. In the main part of this thesis, the analysis to the typical sentences of the five kinds of metaphors is given. The analysis is based on the four mental spaces in the Conceptual Blending Theory. There are four mental spaces in Conceptual Blending Theory:two input spaces, generic space, and blend space. The construction of metaphorical meaning is reflected in these four mental spaces. However, anther concept is also need to be mentioned, that is emergent structure. Actually, the construction of new metaphorical meaning is finished in this structure. This structure is constituted by three processes:composition, completion and elaboration. The description of it will be given in chapter three.For Conceptual Blending Theory is developed in recent years, this thesis also enriches the corpus for the theory research. The study can help language learner better understand the context of the American political texts and political texts as a whole, for it can give a better comprehending of the addresser’s intentionto have a glimps of the acceptance depth based on modern linguistic analysis.