A Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Diplomatic Discourses

Conceptual metaphor has been the focus of linguists for a long time. Lakoff has made some researches on American political conceptual metaphors in recent years, such as terrorism metaphors, war metaphors, metaphors in foreign affairs, etc. Yet there is no systematic study on metaphor in diplomatic discourse until now, we should explore the ambiguous and controversial problems in this area.Contrastive analysis and citing instances methods are adopted to analyze the conceptual metaphors in negotiations. Firstly, the author makes an investigation of literature study on the metaphor, conceptual metaphor, diplomacy and negotiation as the theoretical basis. Secondly, the dissertation makes a descriptive and contrastive analysis on conceptual metaphors in the six-party talks, and finds the similarities and differences between Chinese conceptual metaphors and English conceptual metaphors used in the six-party talks. Finally, the author wants to explore the causes underlying these differences and similarities from a cultural perspective, which is to further testify that the conceptual metaphor is culture specific. Lakoff's theory did not touch more about the description of cultural coherence of metaphors. Therefore, it is hoped that this study can enrich the theory.In a word, the cultural coherence of metaphors plays a great role in diplomatic negotiations. The dissertation only summarizes the conceptual metaphor on six-party talks and verifies the universality of conceptual metaphors both in Chinese and English diplomatic negotiations. At present, the research in diplomatic discourse is not enough. We expect new ideas and theories to guide and improve this field.