A Study On Idea Metaphors In Female Political Speeches

The masterpiece Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff&Johnson,1980) marks the shift ofmetaphor study from the rhetoric perspective to cognitive view and the cognitiveapproach has expanded the scope of metaphor study since then. In the last twodecades, previous researches abound in such areas as rhetoric, lexicon, syntax anddiscourse at different levels. Besides, the corpus of metaphor study extends beyondliterary works, covering other kinds of discourses such as media, economic andpolitical. Political speeches are a significant cultural phenomenon in the westernsociety whose role as a useful weapon is of crucial importance on political stage.Lakoff (2005) introduces metaphor into political discourses, and takes metaphoras a tool for the revelations of emotions and values behind. Stimulated by thepioneering work of Lakoff and his colleagues (1993;1999,2002), researches ofmetaphor in politics has become a hot issue. Based on conceptual metaphorframework, combining systematic metaphor development in subsequent studies doneby Lakoff and his associates, this thesis summarizes the four categories of ideametaphor in female political speeches, namely, idea-as-people metaphor,idea-as-object metaphor, idea-as-journey metaphor and idea-as-war metaphor in orderto explore the ideology of female politicians. In idea-as-people metaphors, ideas arepersonified as people; in idea-as-object metaphors, abstract ideas are conceptualizedas concrete objects; and in idea-as-journey metaphors, ideas are compared to ajourney, while in idea-as-war metaphors, ideas are conceptualized as a war.Through identification, interpretation and explanation in the corpus, fourworking modes of idea metaphors are summarized, that is, personification mappingwhere ideas are specified as being a person; objectification mapping where ideas areperceived in the framework of an object; procedure mapping in which the procedureof forming an idea is seen as the process in a journey; and analogy mapping where theparticipants, characteristics, and goals of a war are mapped onto ideas.Previous metaphor studies in political discourses are mainly based on malepolitical speeches. However, with the approaching of “she-era” in the internationalpolitical stage, female politicians begin to draw the public’s attention. It is hoped thatthrough this thesis further thoughts on female political speeches would be inspired.