Studies On The Functions Of Metaphor In English Political Speeches

Metaphor is an important research topic that has drawn intellectual pursuits since ancient times. It has been studied for more than two thousand years. According to different approaches to identifying metaphor, the present thesis classifies these approaches into four categories: the semantic approach, the pragmatic approach, the cognitive approach and the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis. After discussing the merits and demerits of each approach, the present thesis points out that the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis is incorporative and systematic. This approach includes the merits of the other three approaches and it argues that to analyze metaphor at discourse level, the knowledge of semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics is required.From Aristotle, metaphor has been studied from many aspects, for example, its classifications, characteristics, experiential bases and its functions. However, little systematic research on metaphor's functions has been made in the field of political speeches, even rarely done from the perspective of Critical Metaphor Analysis. Some linguists such as Ricoeur (1975), Gibbs (1994) and Lakoff (2005) have already begun to study metaphor at discourse level and point out that metaphor also has discourse functions. But they do not explore systematically how metaphor works in discourses. Lakoff (2005) introduces metaphor into political discourses, but he just takes metaphor as an analytical tool to uncover the emotions and values in political discourses. Black (2004) adopts the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis to count and analyze the conceptual metaphors in political discourses but he does not explore the functions of metaphor either. Based on the previous researches on metaphor, the present thesis explores the functions of metaphor in political speeches by adopting the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis.Because of the multiformity and complexity of political speeches, the present thesis just chooses the 55 US Presidential Inaugural Speeches, ranging from G. Washington to G. W. Bush. The present study is to be divided into two stages: first, take a close reading of the 55 samples in the corpus and identify the metaphors in relation to the criteria for the definition of metaphor specified in Chapter One. And then these metaphors are classified according to their source domains. Second, analyze the functions of these metaphors in these speeches. The results show that in these speeches, there are 10 conceptual metaphors and 6,564 linguistic metaphors. And these metaphors have the following functions:(1) Conceptual metaphors can perform the cohesive and coherent functions through choices of words in political speeches.(2) Conceptual metaphors in political speeches have persuasive functions of framing and influencing the readers' (or listeners') values and emotions.The present thesis enriches the study of metaphor at discourse level from the perspectives of discourse and politics. Furthermore, this study reveals the close relationship between metaphor and cognition in political speeches and provides a useful tool to analyze political speeches, that is, Critical Metaphor Analysis.The data for this thesis are available on the website http://www.bartleby.com/124/.