A Contrastive Study Of Political Metaphors Of China’s Image In Chinese And American Official Discourse

China and the United States,as the world’s two economies,have attracted much attention in terms of comprehensive national strength and cultural soft power.In terms of language communication,it has always been an unavoidable theme to explore the perspective of China’s image in Chinese and American official discourse.China’s image reflects the combination of China’s cognition of itself and that of other factors in the international system.This is the duality of it.In addition,conceptual metaphor as a language rhetoric with clear directivity and profound connotation plays a very significant role in the expression and transmission of national will and traditional values between China and America.This study tried to explore the differences in political purposes,ways of thinking and cultural orientations hidden behind the language by the way of studying similarities and differences on political metaphors of China’s images in Chinese and American official discourses.this research mainly focuses on answering those following research questions in order to facilitate the sorting and development of problems in the research process.1.What are the main types of political metaphors about China’s image in the official discourse of China and America? 2.What are the characteristics of the choices of metaphorical expressions of China’s image in the Chinese and American official discourse? 3.What are the factors in ideology and cultural values between China and America reflected in these metaphorical differences?With China’s image as the research subject,the research selected typical Chinese and American official discourses during 2016 to 2018 totally 2464547 words.Based on the theory of conceptual metaphors in cognitive linguistics and the research method of corpus quantitative analysis and critical discourse analysis,this paper makes a comparative study of the China’s image in the official discourse of China and America.The research steps roughly as follows: firstly,through manual selection,collection and screening combination of keywords,the screening of time within the scope of research subject of discourse,and sorted according to time and source,clean up the political metaphors in discourse.Then,Take the country as the standard to integrate the categories and establish two folders corpus named “Chinese official discourse” and “American official discourse”.After that,make annotations and assignments on them by using Tree Tagger3＿Lite.Next,the types of political metaphors of China’s image in Chinese and American official discourses are summarized.Political metaphors are quantitatively analyzed by Ant Conc and Word Smith software concordance and word frequency of retrieval source domain words.Then,it further explains the similarities and differences in the language expression of China’s image in Chinese and American official discourse,and explains the reasons behind these differences and similarities.Through a series of analysis and argumentation,this study draws the following main conclusions:Firstly,there are 10 main types of metaphors surrounding China’s image in Chinese and American official discourse,they are WAR metaphors,ROAD metaphors,FRIEND metaphors,TEAM metaphors,POWER metaphors,ORIENTATIONAL metaphors,BANNER metaphors,SHAPE metaphors,ACTION metaphors,and DISTANCE metaphors.Secondly,through the analysis of the commonness and individuality of Chinese and American official discourses,we can find some potential similarities and differences in ideology and cultural orientation behind the language.For example,the traditional culture and values of China and the United States have a direct impact on the use of political metaphors in official discourse.It reflects the different cultural choices between China and America on collectivism and individualism.Thirdly,keywords in Chinese official discourse reflects the relationship between people and traditional Chinese Confucianism as the source domain,defining China as a friend image,comparing China to a modest,kind and helpful image,and pays attention to the maintenance of social relations.The official discourse of the United States generally defines China as a cooperative partner,and China is regarded as a participant in a war and competition.The promotion of the cultural values of“American dream” with freedom,democracy and justice as the core words sets off the opposite side of China’s image.