Study On Metaphors Of New Year Editorials Of People's Daily (1949～2008)

With new year editorials of People's Daily to be research object,14 concept metaphors to be cut-in point,and quantitative & qualitative,synchronic & diachronic analysis to be analytical approach,this article attempts to explore the interaction of political metaphors and political reality and to provide profitable try on combination of political discourse analysis and political communication and propaganda.The article divides into three parts:theory and method,analysis of samples and questions and discussion.Part 1 is theory and method,which introduces Foucault's discourse theory,Lakoff's concept metaphor theory,critical discourse analysis and quantitative & qualitative, synchronic & diachronic analytical approach.Part 2 is analysis of samples.Through quantitative analysis,14 metaphors have been screened out to be research objects.Then the article investigates these metaphors in a qualitative way,which combines examples and cognitive experience through analyzing key words and semantic features of metaphors.At last,the article summaries 5 characteristics of the metaphors.Firstly,the kind of metaphor used is comparatively stable.Secondly,metaphors used to express negative meanings tend to disappear.Thirdly,newly arisen concept metaphors tend to express positive feelings.Fourthly,the metaphors are inclined to have the following semantic features:【+ stable】,【+dynamic】and【+prototype category】.Fifthly,political metaphors have 5 impacts on political reality,eg.infiltrate, construct,deduce,evaluate and classify;meanwhile,the latter can control the usage of former.Part 3 is questions and discussion.In this part critical discourse analysis,concept metaphor theory,sociology,journalism and communication science have been used to discuss several questions concerning diachronic change of concept metaphors of New Year editorials.Social context and perceptive experience have also been adopted to come to the conclusions as follow.Firstly,thanks to the power of political metaphors,media takes the power of discourse and consequently takes the power of shaping the society.Secondly,political reality controls political metaphors,which makes metaphor usage generally match the change of social politics and Communist Party's political ideas.Thirdly,audience group and media can affect metaphor usage as well.