The Ideological Power Of Metaphor-case Study Of Political Speeches Given By George W.bush And Hu Jintao

The present thesis endeavors to argue that the combination of conceptual metaphor theory and CDA provides a more comprehensive and interpretative theoretical framework for the exploration of the ideological power of metaphor in political public speeches. The article adopts the bottom-up and top-down approaches to analyze from different perspectives and different levels the functions of the dominant metaphors and cultural metaphors hidden in the political speeches given by Chinese President Hu Jintao and US President George W. Bush in reflecting, reinforcing and constructing ideologies, and to make a contrastive analysis to find out the similarities and differences, and the basis of these conceptual metaphors with an aim to uncover the hidden ideologies, attitudes, belief and value systems. The bottom-up approach uses a set of criteria for the definition of metaphor suggested by Charteris-Black (2004:21), i.e. semantic tension, pragmatic evaluation and cognitive analogy, to infer from metaphorical linguistic expressions the hidden conceptual metaphors and conceptual keys. According to Charteris-Black (2004:224), identification of these conceptual levels enhances our understanding of their role in ideology because it provides a point of access into the thoughts that underlie language use. The top-down approach explores the basis of the conceptual metaphors to show how ideology and belief and value systems guide and constrain the completion of metaphorization. These two approaches are complementary to each other and together they are helpful in exploring how people in power make full use of the power of metaphorically constructing the similarity between two different things to achieve the purpose of defining, categorizing and merging the world in accordance with their own interests. In a word, metaphor can be used by discourse producers to guide the ideology of the public, construct ideology and create reality for the purpose of sustaining or subverting the existing social power.The results of the corpus analysis are as follows:in the Chinese corpus there are six dominant metaphors——family metaphors, journey metaphors, building metaphors, conflict metaphors, plant metaphors and circle metaphors——and in the American corpus the six dominant metaphors are family metaphors, journey metaphors, building metaphors, conflict metaphors, plant metaphors and religion metaphors. Circle metaphors are specific to the Chinese culture while religion metaphors are American culture-specific. Although family metaphors, journey metaphors, building metaphors are present in both Chinese and American corpora, the two Presidents apply different structures or frames to the same metaphorical themes because of the different social, economic and cultural activities and the different value and belief systems of the two nations. The Chinese President Hu Jintao uses the six dominant metaphors present in the Chinese corpus to motivate people of all ethnic groups to unify their thoughts, to unite closely around the CPC (Communist Party of China) Central Committee, to safeguard the reunification of the motherland and to forge ahead as one entity along the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics in an effort to achieve the grand goal of socialist modernization and building a moderately prosperous and harmonious society in all aspects. President Bush uses the six dominant metaphors present in the American corpus to propagate western values such as freedom, liberty and democracy, to persuade the audience to adapt themselves to global capitalism, to show America's determination in the war of terrorism and to defend and justify the war on terrorism on one hand and to establish himself as a moral authority or a strict father on the other hand.