Conceptual Metaphor And Ideological Analysis In Anti-Terrorism Speeches Of President George W. Bush

Metaphor has become an essential part in people's cognitive mechanism instead of being perceived as language phenomenon ever since the publication of masterpiece Metaphor We Live By contributed by Lakoff and Johnson. Lakoff underlined that conceptual metaphor can be taken as a tool to disclose the hidden ideologies and values in political discourses. Critical Discourse Studies, known as CDA, aims at revealing the dialectical relationship among language, ideology and power mainly from the perspective of linguistic features and context. This means that the ideologies of people in great power and higher social status are embedded into language which will in turn reinforce their ideologies to exert control over people's ideologies. And this is exactly the same with conceptual metaphor in terms of its function and effectiveness. Thus the two approaches simply take relationship between language and ideology from different angles.Former studies seldom approach political discourse systematically from conceptual metaphor and in some cases the critical readings into the data have been simplified. Against this background, systematic studies have been conducted in this thesis from conceptual metaphor on anti-terrorism speeches by President Bush. In order to offset the disadvantages of conceptual metaphor in studies of other linguistic features and context, Critical Discourse Analysis and macro discourse strategies have been introduced into the studies for a deeper analysis of the data and for a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of how language producers make use of language to put their ideas across while imposing their ideologies and will on others at the same time. Under the guidance of Fairclough's three-dimensional model, CDA studies have been divided into three stages, namely, description, interpretation and explanation. In the first stage, the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions in Halliday's systematic functional linguistics are applied to studies of linguistic features and the second stage deals with the contents of discourse and the relationship between participants while explanation is concerned with the role of social factors and historical context in discourse production. Upon the September 11, President Bush explicitly launched the war on terrorism and took the opportunity to push forward American hegemonism. All the data indicate that President Bush has made full use of terrorist atrocities and American good deeds to increase people's hatred towards terrorists whereas paying more respect to the U.S. and his coalitions. And this adds more weight to the dialectical relationship between language and ideology. Language is on the one hand the carrier of ideologies of language producers and it can reinforce these ideologies on the other hand. And the tactics of language producers are examined from macro level in the last stage of the studies.The studies show that the Ontological, structural and family metaphors play a pivotal role in controlling people's thoughts and justifying the war on terror and the combination of conceptual metaphor and CDA is a much more effective approach in political discourse analysis since they are complementary to each other and can take a close look at the data from different perspectives. Furthermore, studies through conceptual metaphor and CDA will enhance people's capability in critical readings and provide valuable suggestions for language teaching.