A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And English Presidential Political Speeches

Through a contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in political speeches by Chinese President Hu Jintao and American President Barack Obama, this thesis has discovered the similarities and differences of the conceptual metaphors in the two languages, distilled the deep causes of these metaphors and further proved the fact that abstract concepts in Chinese political discourses are fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Moreover, this thesis has dealt with some issues related to interdisciplinary researches of metaphor.The study divides the public speeches of Chinese President Hu Jintao's and American President Barack Obama's into five categories:Address on National Independence; Address in University; Address on Earthquake Resistance and Disaster Relief; New Year Greetings and Inaugural Address. Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the author adopts the Critical Metaphor Approach, that is, metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation, and metaphor explanation, to carry out a contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in the data.The study has solved the following problems:(1) testified the universality of conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourses; (2) answered the question that whether abstract concepts are partially constructed and realized in terms of conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourses; (3) discovered the typical conceptual metaphors in the data; (4) generalized the similarities and differences of the conceptual metaphors in the data and distilled the underlying factors of them from the perspective of embodied philosophy.The contrastive study shows that:(1) conceptual metaphors are universal in constructing abstract concepts in Chinese political discourses; (2) abstract concepts are partially constructed and realized in terms of conceptual metaphors in Chinese political discourses. However, there is no employment of the abstract to metaphorize the abstract or the abstract to metaphorize the concrete. (3) there are Human Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Journey Metaphor and Family Metaphor in both English and Chinese data; Drama Metaphor and Religion Metaphor are specific to English data while War Metaphor and Circle Metaphor are unique in Chinese data; (4) on the one hand, the similarities of the conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese political discourses are a natural result of the experiential bases of metaphorical concepts rather than a coincidence. Since Americans and Chinese share a lot of same or similar embodied experiences which human cognition is rooted in, it should hardly be surprising that people from different nations share a large number of same or similar conceptual structures; on the other hand, people's language patterns, cultural assumptions, and linguistic worldviews strongly influence their thinking so that different characteristics can be found in the respective metaphorical cognition of English and Chinese political language. Therefore, people from different cultural environments use different conceptual metaphors to categorize and conceptualize the world.