Metaphorical Analysis Of American Presidential Inaugural Address

Metaphor has been studied for 2000 years, from rhetoric perspective to pragmatic and cognitive perspective. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published the book Metaphors we live by, in which metaphor has been regarded as a part of human behavior existing in language as well as in thought, rather than one of the most common ways of rhetoric. Metaphor is based on bodily experience of the objective world, and has features of universalality, systematicy and cultural consistency.Political discourse is important in western political life, and American Presidential Inaugural Address (short for APIAs) is a typical political discourse which is delivered in the inauguration of the candidate's successful elections of being a president, and sets forth politics and makes some promise to persuade the public to support him and his policy. Thus to make the APIAs powerful and emotional, politicians use positive methods in the discourse such as parallelism, repetition and metaphor in their speech. Metaphor is always taken as a typical method, as metaphor's function is to inspire, persuade and motivate the audiences'emotion.Many scholars are fond of this field and have done many researches on the characteristics of political discourse. This paper attempts to apply the cognitive metaphor theory to analyze political discourse. Through the analysis of the 16 inaugurals made by 14 American presidents from 1789 to 1993, the conceptual metaphors in political discourse will be well clarified and the basis and functions of these metaphors will be investigated at large. It is a systematic study of conceptual metaphors through analyzing typical and authentic data of political discourse. This will also reveal how metaphor works in political language. Besides, this paper will explore the function of metaphorizing in political discourse, especially persuasive function. In reality, it can help people understand American politics in a certain way.