Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And American Political Speeches: A Contrastive Study From The Perspective Of CMA

With the development of society, democracy and civilization have become the common pursuit of people all over the world. Therefore, politicians usually need to arouse passion in the audience and gain their support by means of public speeches, so as to achieve their political purpose of propaganda, education, instigation or communication. However, political concepts are often dull and abstract. To be better understood and accepted by the audience, politicians generally use simple and vivid language to express those abstract political concepts. For this purpose, metaphor is their best choice because of its excellent demagogic and elucidatory functions.Scholars from different countries have been studying metaphor for more than 2000 years, from taking it as a kind of mere rhetorical device to regarding it as the reflection of human conceptual systems. Especially in the past few decades, more and more linguists began to turn their attention to the research of metaphor in political language. However, few have carried out contrastive studies of conceptual metaphors in political speeches.The data used in this research are taken from the addresses to university students given by the Presidents of PRC, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and by the Presidents of the United States, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, during their state visits. Among them, the Chinese corpus comprises 14073 Chinese characters and the American corpus contains 11696 words. Based on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory, this research makes a contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in the Chinese and American corpora through three steps - metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation, and metaphor explanation, which are proposed by Charteris-Black (2004) in his approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this research.Data analysis shows that conceptual metaphors abound both in Chinese and in American political speeches and persuasion is the main function of them. The dominant conceptual metaphors in the Chinese corpus are journey metaphors, building metaphors, war metaphors, family metaphors and plant metaphors; whereas the major domains of metaphors in the American corpus include journey, war, building, religion and plant. There are similarities as well as differences in the use of conceptual metaphors in the two corpora. The same conceptual metaphors that occur in the two corpora include building metaphors, family metaphors, plant metaphors, human metaphors and study metaphors; metaphors of the same source domain but of different target domains found in the two corpora include journey metaphors, war metaphors, and physical environment metaphors; and chess metaphors and religion metaphors are unique to the Chinese and American corpus respectively. Moreover, our analysis also reveals that the differences in the use of these metaphors are mainly caused by different social and cultural backgrounds of the two countries, particularly differences in ideology, history, custom and religion.Our CMA (Critical Metaphor Analysis) approach to the study of metaphor integrates the perspectives of corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, contrastive analysis and critical discourse analysis. It is not only an attempt at a new method of studying metaphor, but also promotes further research on Chinese and American politics and cultures. Besides, the analysis of the rhetorical and persuasive functions of metaphors in political speeches will benefit translation studies of political discourse. In foreign language teaching, analysis of the cultural basis of metaphors will help students understand the foreign culture, and hence understand and master the language itself better.