A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In American And Chinese Political Discourse

Metaphor study has become an important branch of cognitive, since the cognitive science intervened into linguistics. Metaphor research has a long history. From Aristotle's "comparison theory", Richard's "interaction theory" to the "mapping theory" which people are familiar with. In fact, many linguists have studied metaphor theory in many aspects. In traditional viewpoints, metaphor is seen as a pure linguistic phenomenon, and it is studied as a figure of speech. However, contemporary American linguists Lakoff and Johnson (1980) believe that metaphor is not only a rhetorical device but it is a universal way of thinking, as well as a cognitive instrument. Metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life, and it is everywhere in our thinking and everyday language. Our conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. Thus, political language is metaphorical in essence.Political language has been studied for a long time and can be tracked back to Aristotle's time. Most studied deal with political language from the perspectives of rhetoric, pragmatics, and functional linguistics. In recent years, many scholars have studied political language from the perspective of metaphor, but few paid attention to the contrastive studies of American political language and Chinese political language from the angle of metaphor.Political discourse has strong political overtones, so the expressions are abstract and difficult to understand. Critical discourse analysis focuses on the research of the relationship between power and ideology. From this theory, we know that the expression of thought and implementation of power depend on the medium of language. Conceptual metaphor is a more powerful language tool.In this paper, the author uses conceptual metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis to compare and analyze the data in the discourses. The data used in this paper are "The Report on the Work of the Government" by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, and "The State of the Union Address" by American President Obama in 2010. Based on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory, the author tries to identify metaphors and find out the similarities and differences in Chinese data and American data; meanwhile, the author also points out the roles of metaphors and the underlying ideology.The results are as follows:Chinese data and American data share the common conceptual metaphors:journey metaphors, the war metaphors, the construct metaphors, family metaphors and organism metaphors. Although they have the same conceptual metaphors, their specific contents are different. In Chinese data, circle metaphors, chess metaphors are the unique metaphors are discussed. In American data, the unique metaphors religion Metaphors and business metaphors are talked about.As far as the functions of the metaphors are concerned, the author finds that motivation functions are mainly emphasized in Chinese data. However, in American data, simplification function tends to take the most percentage. The differences are due to their different social, political and cultural approaches.All in all, we can find that they all use a number of conceptual metaphors to express their own political thoughts and standpoints in their speeches. Moreover, in order to achieve the purpose of persuading and motivating the people, they use the concrete concept to understand the abstract political concepts by means of mapping.