A Study Of The Conceptual Metaphors In American Presidential Inaugural Address (APIA)

Political speech is an important phenomenon in the western world as well as a style of discourse which plays an important part in political field. The American presidential inaugural address (APIA) is a typical political speech that is presented by the president when he assumes the post to publicize his policies and persuade the public to accept and support them. APIA is special and important in that it is of historical significance and worldwide influence.As one focus of linguistic studies, APIA has drawn the attention of many scholars and has been linguistically studied in some aspects. This thesis tends to employ conceptual metaphor to analyze the American presidential inaugural addresses. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980:3),―metaphors are pervasive in daily life, not just in language but in thought and action. As a way of knowing the world by human being, conceptual metaphor is closely related to cognition, which can effectively reveal ideas and thoughts of human being.‖Conceptual metaphors are widely applied in APIAs, by which the public would accept the presidents'policies and political strategies from the bottom of their hearts.Both qualitative study and quantitative study are used in the thesis to analyze the 923 conceptual metaphors in the 56 APIAs of 38 American presidents. These metaphors are identified, classified and analyzed in details, with the conclusion that five concepts, human, journey, war, family and building, are adopted as the main source models, and the metaphors based on the five categories make up 75.5 percentage of all the metaphors studied; another five concepts, light, illness, stage, business and object, are employed as the minor source models in the metaphorical mappings. All the major and minor metaphors are so closely related to people's daily life and personal experiences that they can hear, understand and accept the presidents'policies more willingly and more easily. By using these metaphors, the presidents can reveal underlying ideologies, frame political images, and select information, and additionally, make their addresses more coherent.The analysis in the thesis, on one hand, strengthens the theory that metaphor is not simply a rhetorical device, but a cognitive mechanism of human beings. It also proves that language is metaphorical in nature on the other hand.