Critical Metaphor Analysis Of The State Of The Union Addresses Of The USA (1992-2010)

Metaphor is an implied figure of speech. It is not only a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in our daily life, but a widespread cognitive phenomenon as well. Cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor is a thinking mode of perceiving and understanding the world. Similarities are constructed by means of mapping mechanism, and metaphors are conductive to relating something known to something unknown which are abstract and complicated. According to cognitive linguists, such as Lakoff and Johnson, human language is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphors, as a means of understanding the world, can reveal the mode of thinking, provide a new perspective to what is around us, and also create new meaning. Various discourses are flooded with metaphors, of course in political discourses. Thompson (1996:185) claims politics without metaphors is like a fish out of water; metaphor is necessary for ordinary people to interpret politics. A major function of political metaphors is to link the individual and the political by providing a way of seeing relations, reifying abstractions, and framing complexity in manageable terms.Critical Metaphor Analysis, proposed by Charteris-Black in 2004, is a kind of effective metaphor analyzing mechanism, bringing together perspectives from critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics in an attempt at revealing linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive characteristics of metaphors and providing insight into the beliefs, attitudes and feelings of the discourse community in which they occur. Critical Metaphor Analysis is a new and effective supplementary means of understanding more about the complicated relationship between language, thought and social context.In the framework of Charteris-Black's Critical Metaphor Analysis, this thesis analyzes metaphors in the State of the Union Address (hereafter the SUA) of the USA from 1992 to 2010. Data are collected in order to identify metaphors by the combination of Oxford Word Smith Tools 4.0 and manual work, and then two categories of figures are presented. The first category indicates the trend of the eight kinds of stable metaphors in this period, and the second category is about the proportions of metaphors of each year. In addition, each kind of stable metaphor is analyzed deeply from the qualitative perspective, including mapping mechanism and profound connotation. Besides, the reasons for the metaphor applications are explored in relation to social and historical environments, pragmatic intentions and cognition, etc.The research shows the importance of political metaphors for the interpretation of political discourses. Different frequencies of each kind of metaphor actually result from the domestic and international political environments and significant events, but the impact of the temperaments or characters of different presidents is little. This is because the SUA, a summary of the previous year's work and a plan for the coming year, is the composition of teamwork, so it is more objective than other speeches. This thesis summarizes the main findings, puts forward the limitations and provides some suggestions for future study on metaphors of the SUA.