Metaphorization In The US Presidential Inaugural Addresses

American presidential inaugural addresses is an important kind of public speaking, while public speaking is taken as an essential form of stylistics in western countries. The prominent purpose of political speaking usually is to invoke the people so as to seek their support. Because they are always written by teams of talented writers in advance, along with its instantaneity, they have the characteristics of both spoken and written English, which is very different from other types of discourse. Such a feature greatly influences the content and characteristics of public speeches.Although many scholars are interested in the features of speaking, they mainly concentrate on the discussion of such features as syntax, lexis, phonetics and phonology, rhetorical devices and of the stylistic features. Few researchers have carried out studies from the perspective of metaphor, incorporating the linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic dimensions to reveal the underlying concepts and ideologies.According to such cognitive linguists as Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is not just a device of poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish. On the contrary, metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. So the American presidential inaugural addresses are metaphorical in essence. Thus this study endeavors to analyze the metaphors employed in the US presidential inaugural addresses to reveal the implicit ideologies of the politicians for the purpose of persuading and invoking American people through the use of metaphors.This thesis aims to identify, classify and explain the metaphorization in the US presidential inaugural corpus by incorporating its linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic dimensions. Metaphor has a number of different roles in language: a semantic role in creating new meanings for words, a cognitive role in developingour understanding on the basis of analogy and a pragmatic role which aims to provide evaluations. These interconnecting aspects of metaphor imply that it is a complex area of inquiry. The analysis of metaphor, therefore, needs to incorporate its linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic dimensions. So we can better reveal the underlying ideologies of public speeches through this approach to metaphor.Based on Lakoff and Johnson's theory, this thesis takes the US presidential inaugural addresses as its data to conduct a quantitative analysis of metaphor, interprets the findings and explores the implications of the findings in other types of discourse.In the Introduction, several questions concerning this thesis are clarified, including a brief review of speeches and political speeches, previous study on political speeches, the necessity of this study, the methodology of the research and the layout of the thesis.Chapter One gives a brief survey of US presidential inaugural addresses, embracing the significance of presidential inaugural addresses, the reasons of the addresses as a persuasive genre and its general features.Chapter Two offers the theoretical framework for the present study including the definition of metaphor, instead of regarding metaphor as a traditional rhetorical device, integrating the linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic dimensions. Some basic theories and concepts are also introduced and clarified, embracing the interrelationship between metaphor and other disciplinary studies, such as the interrelationship between metaphor, ideology and thought, metaphor and pragmatics, cognitive semantics and conceptual metaphor. The understanding of metaphor usually occurs in a context, therefore, the pragmatic dimensions are also considered in researching metaphor. And the difference between conventional and creative metaphor is also studied. Creative metaphor will gradually become conventional after they have become familiar to people. Still, while metaphors may be conventional to some individuals, they may be creative to other individuals because their life experiences are different. This point is alsotrue of the language communities. This preliminary study provides the theoretical framework for the metaphor study in the US presidential inaugural addresses which are to be dealt with.In Chapter Three, the core of the thesis, a linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic study is conducted to investigate the metaphors in the US presidential inaugural corpus. The types of metaphor in the corpus are researched according to its resonance. The result of the inquiry is as follows: The most pervasive type of metaphor is conflict metaphors, then come journey metaphors, building metaphors, fire and light metaphors, physical environment metaphors, religion metaphors;and the last one is body part metaphors. The findings in the study are greatly helpful in revealing how politicians employ the underlying metaphor to establish common ground with the voting public by referring to familiar domains of personal experience and social activities.Chapter Four explores how the findings of the present study are applied to other fields of studies. From the study of metaphor in the US presidential inaugural addresses, we can say that metaphor can make discourse more accessible. Therefore, the analysis of metaphor is a method of discourse analysis to some extent. It can not only be extended to the analysis of political speeches and speeches, but also very useful in the analysis of other types of discourse, such as literary works, English for Science and Technology, news discourse and advertising discourse etc.The Conclusion summarizes the whole thesis and points out the limitations of this study and the unsolved problems in the thesis, which need to be further investigated.