The　Metaphor Study In English Political Speeches

Political speech is an important cultural phenomenon in western societies, and it is also amajor style of western political texts. It plays a very important role in political life and it is apowerful weapon for politicians. Political speeches are mainly used to state political opinions.The primary purpose is to persuade readers or audience to believe that their policies and opinionsare right and can be trusted. Because of the stylistic features of political texts, people believe thatjournalists and politicians should abide by the principles of objectivity, neutrality, accuracy andauthenticity and had better avoid the adoption of metaphors and especially novel metaphors.However, there are large amount of metaphors existing in political speeches. The contemporaryconceptual metaphor theory points out that the target concept of a metaphor is created partiallyby means of a source concept, which popularly exists in human thought and behaviors. Anymetaphor highlighting some aspects of a concept simultaneously conceals other aspects. Novelmetaphors can also provide creative reformation of familiar concepts by highlighting thoseaspects hidden by most conventional metaphors.Even though the conceptual metaphor theory is a key breakthrough in the history ofmetaphor study, there are also some scholars who criticize it. Among them, the representativeones are Charteris-Black and Deignan. They point out that the conceptual metaphor theorymainly uses introspective data in metaphor study which later is proved unreliable. The criticalmetaphor analysis (Henceforth CMA) provided by them absorbs many fields’ researching results(especially the corpus linguistics). It supplements the conceptual metaphor theory. The CMA canshow the relationship between metaphorical expressions and contexts around them. Its mainpurpose is to reveal the hidden ideologies, value systems and belief.This study is based on the conceptual metaphor theory and the method of CMA to analyzemetaphors in English political speeches. Data come from the15political speeches addressed bythe Republican Party’s president George W. Bush and the15political speeches made by theDemocratic Party’s president Barack Obama. By analyzing and comparing the metaphor uses inthe two corpora, this study hopes to reveal the underlying ideologies and values of the speakers,and at the same time it reveals how politicians use metaphors to realize the persuasive purpose oftheir political speeches.This study shows that there are similarities and differences about the use of metaphors in thetwo corpora. One similarity is that metaphors are drawn from a relatively narrow range of sourcedomains which are all related to our everyday experiences such as weather, sleep, finance, andreading. The other similarity is that metaphors used in the two corpora share the same function ofpersuasion. In terms of differences, this study shows that there is a high frequency of metaphors and a wide range of types of metaphor in Obama’s corpus. He uses nearly1metaphor in every100words, but Bush uses only one metaphor every174words. Obama’s metaphors originatefrom more than20different source domains including both conventional metaphors and novelmetaphors. The other obvious difference is that there is a higher frequency of crime andpunishment metaphors in Bush’s political speeches, but this type of metaphor rarely occur inObama’s political speeches.In short, through the analysis of metaphors in Bush and Obama’s political speeches, thisstudy enables people to know the different ideologies of the two American political parties. Atthe same time, since this study adopts the critical stance in metaphor analysis, its pragmaticsignificance is to raise reader’s critical reading level and to help them have a betterunderstanding of different or even conflicting social values and political ideologies implied inpolitical texts.