A Study On Conceptual Metaphor In New Year’s Speeches Of Chinese National Leaders

The theory of conceptual metaphor holds that metaphor is a systematic mapping from a specific conceptual domain to an abstract conceptual domain,and metaphor is a way of thinking and cognitive means.The study of metaphor from this cognitive linguistic perspective breaks through the traditional rhetoric level of metaphor research.Due to the similarity,relevance,and mapping of conceptual metaphors,which can better express language connotations and policy trends,a large number of conceptual metaphors are often applied in political discourse.As a type of political discourse,New Year’s speeches often raise China’s views and voice,which has attracted widespread attention from both domestic and foreign figures.The language style of New Year’s speeches is unique,concise and comprehensive,and the content includes a summary of the past year and prospects for the future.Therefore,the conceptual metaphors contained in the New Year’s speeches discourse have certain research value.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),this study aims to explore the distribution,causes,and functions of conceptual metaphors in New Year’s speeches by analyzing conceptual metaphors in New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders,so as to deeply understand the rich connotations in New Year’s speeches.In order to achieve the above research objectives,this study sets the following three research questions:(1)What are the types of metaphors used in New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders? What are the distribution characteristics?(2)What are the causes of the formation of conceptual metaphors in New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders?(3)What are the functions of conceptual metaphors in New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders?This study selects 22 New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders from 2000 to 2022 as the corpus and uses the Metaphor Identification Procedure proposed by the Pragglejaz Group(2007)to identify and classify the conceptual metaphors of the research object.Then the study uses Excel tables to calculate the number and proportion of each metaphor type,and forms relevant charts to facilitate quantitative analysis of metaphor types and distribution characteristics.When analyzing each type of metaphor,through examples and induction,this study summarizes the mapping laws of conceptual metaphors and analyzes the rich connotations behind the example sentences to further qualitatively analyze their causes and functions in combination with social background.The findings of the study are as follows: Firstly,according to the conceptual metaphor categories,conceptual metaphors in New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders are divided into three categories: structural metaphor,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor.Among them,structural metaphors are the most widely distributed.According to the differences in the source domain,target domain and mapping of each conceptual metaphor,this study subdivides it into 19 metaphor modes.Among structural metaphors,journey metaphor,building metaphor and war metaphor are most commonly used.Among orientational metaphors,up-down metaphor is most frequently used.While container metaphor is the most frequently used one among ontological metaphors.Secondly,the causes of the formation of conceptual metaphors in New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders mainly include linguistic cause,cultural cause and cognitive cause.Thirdly,the use of conceptual metaphors New Year’s speeches of Chinese national leaders has rhetorical function,cognitive function,sociocultural function,and interpretation function.This study not only enriches the empirical research results of conceptual metaphors,but also provides a new analytical direction for the study of conceptual metaphors in political discourse.It also fully analyzes the linguistic connotations the policy trends of metaphors in New Year’s speeches which can help readers understand New Year’s speeches better,and providing practical significance for political discourse interpretation,official document writing,and current affairs understanding.