Discursively Constructed Confidence In The Global Financial Crisis: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

Critical Discourse Analysis centers on the relations between language and ideology in terms of language features and discursive settings. At the same time, metaphor can reflect the ideology and values hidden in political discourse in depth. Hence, with an analysis of the relationship between Critical Discourse Analysis and metaphor, this paper tries to testify that Critical Discourse Analysis can also be carried out perfectly through metaphor analysis, although it has been discussed widely in terms of sociolinguistics and other critical methods.The data in this thesis are from a series of Premier Wen's public speeches related to global financial crisis, including the Report on the Government Work (2009), the Record of Press Conference after the Second Session of the Eleventh National People's Congress and the speech"Confidence is much more important than gold and currency in facing with economic crisis"at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2009. In 2008, the global financial crisis attacked the world economy, these public speeches were used to awake people's solidarity and highlight people's confidence to overcome this crisis. The aim of Premier Wen'speeches are to boost people's confidence in overcoming the financial crisis.The thesis discusses Premier Wen's three public speeches by adopting Critical Metaphor Analysis from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. It is found that there are many kinds of conceptual metaphors in these speeches, such as journey metaphor, war metaphor and circle metaphor, building metaphor and so on. The analysis of these conceptual metaphors helps us to find out the ideology presented in Premier Wen's speeches, and then explains that confidence can be discursively constructed with the help of conceptual metaphor.