Metaphors In Contemporary Chinese Political Language

Political language, or political discourse, has been studied for thousands of years, since the time of Aristotle until the present day. A majority of those studies approach political language from the perspectives of rhetoric, functional-structuralism, and pragmatics. The cognitive approach has just risen in recent decades. There have been some studies investigating English political discourse from the perspective of metaphors such as Musolff (2004). But rare attention has been paid to Chinese political language, let alone the metaphors used in it.This thesis aims to identify and discuss the metaphors used in contemporary Chinese political language to figure out their role in such political language. Under the discipline of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is regarded as a cognitive instrument people apply to understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another. A convenient short hand way of capturing this view of metaphor is the following: CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN A IS CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN B, which is called a conceptual metaphor. This term originates from Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By published in 1980. A conceptual metaphor combines two conceptual domains—the source domain and target domain, the former of which is the means we use to understand the latter.In this study the researching corpus comes from the on-line database of People's Daily, including 150 representative texts covering the speeches by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao and the editorials from People's Daily. In order to satisfy the requirements of the analysis tool—Wconcord, the original corpus is first segmented with Ictclas10 (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Lexical Analysis System, version 10). Then the analysis procedure is carried out according to the three stages of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) introduced by Charteris-Black (2004)—metaphor identification, interpretation, and explanation. In this analyzing process, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are involved, the latter dominant.Through the analysis many metaphor source domains have been sought out, such as journey, construction, military area, plant, human body, family, machine, navigation, etc., among which the domain of journey assumes the largest part—nearly a half. All the journey metaphorical expressions manifest a conceptual metaphor: TO WORK ARDUOUSLY FOR THE REALIZATION OF COMMUNISM IS TRAVELING ALONG A PATH TOWARD A DESTINATION. In the system of this concept exist many sub-metaphors, for instance, DECISION-MAKING IS CHOOSING A PATH. Many evidences support those conceptual metaphors. The critical analysis shows that most metaphors from the journey domain carry positive evaluations. They highlight the bright, optimistic, and encouraging aspects of the process of national development. This fact just corresponds with the persuading role of metaphors in political language. In politics metaphors serve as a means of persuasion and an approach to the analysis and solution of political problems. Positive metaphors can bring politics closer to the citizen, thus increasing political participation and further democracy. The results of the analysis show that metaphors from other source domains also form similar conceptual systems and have similar positive evaluations.This tentative research has analyzed metaphors in Chinese political language by applying the approach of CMA and the tools of Ictclas10 and Wconcord. It may fill the gap in metaphor studies in which rare attention has been paid to the Chinese language, particularly political language. Such a metaphor-oriented quantitative study may have some contribution to the study of Chinese political language as well as the study of political discourse in its general sense.