Conceptual Metaphors In Speeches Addressing University Students

Metaphor,a subject that is always concerned with by scholars,has a more than 2000-year history of research.In 1980s,cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson pointed out in Metaphors We Live By that metaphor is more an important cognitive mechanism and thinking style than just a rhetorical tool.This claim helps metaphor escape from traditional metaphor theory based on literature and rhetoric and symbolizes the beginning of modern cognitive metaphor.Lakoff as the forerunner put forward the theory of conceptual metaphor and elaborate its working mechanism.In 2004,Charteris-Black proposed Critical Metaphor Analysis.Charteris-Black proposed that the analysis of the language of powerful and influential people is able to reveal the factors of why they choose emotional words.And this theory analyses metaphor by combination of semantics,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics,so it's more inclusive,equitable and systematic.Speeches,as a major expressive manifestation of Western Political Issues,play an important role in political life.They act as a forceful tool by politicians to allege political ideas of political parties,groups or individuals,to refute opponents and gain over allies.They can strike a chord for the audience by the stimulation of internal concepts,values and emotions and then realize to persuade and urge them to act following politicians' will.A variety of rhetoric approaches provide to exhibit morals, build up images and serves as weapons against opponents;metaphor is such an approach,a representative way to combine human comprehension of everyday experiences with cultural values that can stimulate strong internal emotions.Thus,scholars have profoundly analyzed political speeches by metaphor theories to indicate its characteristics,functions and underlying cultures and ideologies.But we know that the purpose of speeches is to convey information to listeners,it's not one-way process of conveying-receiving.The types of audience vary in respectively different experiences,ideas and ideology.Addressing different audience,the use and functions of metaphor should differ.After a general survey of metaphor research,there is no research of this kind of speech with the students in universities or colleges as the single audience.And,I infer that metaphors will act uniquely in this kind of speech.This paper,based on the hypothesis,analyzes features of conceptual metaphors and the underlying cognitive features in this kind of speeches,taking as corpus Selected Speeches by the American Presidents at the World Famous University by Wang Jianhua.Theoretically,this paper,dependent on conceptual metaphor theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis,better reveals ideology,values reflected by metaphor. Specifically,the paper includes three aspects:First,the research indicates that there are four main conceptual metaphors in the corpus,of which journey metaphors are dominant in quantity and closely followed by building metaphors,then is conflict metaphors and organism metaphors respectively;Second,the research specifically analyze the mapping process of the conceptual metaphors to explain how the source domain is mapped into the target domain.During the analysis,the author resorts to SPSS to analyze which way of metaphorical realization is closely relative to the type of conceptual metaphor;and to explore the deep reasons of why journey metaphors and building metaphors rank top two;Third,the research discusses the cognitive basis and functions and explores the cognitive patterns and thinking qualities.The results justify the general applicability and explanation strengths in larger scope,in addition,explore the dominant functions of journey metaphors and building metaphors in this kind of speeches addressing the students in universities and colleges. The cognitive features reflected by the metaphors are essential to provide valuable reference for the theories and practices of English teaching.I hope this research will offer some reference and enlightenment for the field of the Second Language Acquisition,speech and cross-cultural communication.