A Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese Political Discourse In The Context Of China Dream

Conceptual metaphor is a way that people use the mapping mechanism metaphorically to build an abstract concept.This kind of mapping builds a relation between the two domains so as to achieve the purpose of cognition.In order to help the public have a better understanding of political discourse,politicians make extensive use of conceptual metaphor in it.More and more scholars have done researches on conceptual metaphor in political discourse.Previous researches are done mainly from the perspective of critical discourse,cognition and pragmatics focusing on the analysis of western political discourses or comparative studies between Chinese and western political discourses with an aim for revealing potential ideology behind the words.But few studies have explored the pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphors in political discourse.While,a study on pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphors in political discourse helps politicians transmit their governing ideas by using different conceptual metaphors more effectively.Meanwhile,it also helps the public interpret political discourse more effectively.The data are derived from twenty one speeches delivered by President Xi Jinping on domestic and foreign occasions,which are about politics,economy,culture,society and ecology.The study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods.And the paper probes into the classifications and different pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourse in the context of China dream.After the analysis of the data,the study has found that there are mainly structural metaphors and ontological metaphors in Chinese political discourse in the context of China dream.Structural metaphors mainly include family conceptual metaphor,building conceptual metaphor,war conceptual metaphor,journey conceptual metaphor and organism conceptual metaphor.While,ontological metaphors mainly include machine conceptual metaphor,entity conceptual metaphor,disease conceptual metaphor and weather conceptual metaphor.These different conceptual metaphors have common features,such as systematicity in structure,ubiquity in expression and cultural coherence in content.These different classifications of conceptual metaphor in political discourse can make discourse structure more coherent and cohesive,and discourse content more vivid and richer.Besides,it is much easier to build common cognitive schema and structure between politicians and the public so as to achieve the functions of arousing the public emotion resonance and strengthening the public power.The research shows that the conceptual metaphor realizes its pragmatic functions through the cross-domain mapping from the source domain to the target domain with its unique mapping mechanism.The pragmatic functions in Chinese political discourse in the context of China dream are mainly reflected in two aspects: discourse pragmatic functions and ideology pragmatic functions.Discourse pragmatic functions mainly lay in the following three aspects: textual organization functions in discourse structure,highlighting functions in discourse content and presupposition functions in discourse context.The textual organization functions of conceptual metaphor in discourse structure make discourse structure coherent,cohesive and compact so as to strengthen the consensus of the public and arouse the emotional resonance of the public.The highlighting functions of conceptual metaphor in discourse content make the discourse content vivid,powerful and attractive by highlighting semantic expression,language force and meaning transmission.The presupposition functions of conceptual metaphor in discourse content make the discourse context precise,conventional and rich to achieve illocutionary force,cognitive consensus and semantic orientation.The ideology pragmatic functions mainly lay in the following three aspects: motivating functions in the public emotion,bridging functions in the public relation and analogizing functions in the policy comprehension.The motivating functions of conceptual metaphor are mainly reflected in motivating the Chinese patriotism categorization,cognitive schema and congruent knowledge structure.Based on common experience and cognition constructed by conceptual metaphor,the bridging functions are mainly reflected in closing the distance between government and the public and the distance among all countries.The analogizing functions are mainly reflected in helping the public have a better understanding of political discourse and politicians' governing ideas so as to establish common ideology and the image of Chinese leaders through extending the target domain and making the target semantic rich.This study expands the scope of the research on conceptual metaphor in political discourse,which has some theoretical values and practical significance.However,the breadth and depth of this study is not enough.The thesis hopes to inspire other researchers to do further researches on political discourse and promote the study of it.