Conceptual Metaphor In Political Discourse

The study of conceptual metaphor, initiated largely by Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980)Metaphors We Live by, has witnessed a rapid development. Metaphor analysis entails not onlythe study of language itself, but also that of cognitive mechanism and communicative context. Inthe past several decades, a majority of studies have dealt with conceptual metaphors in politicaldiscourse. However, their focus on introspection has led to a certain lack of attention tocross-linguistic research. And in the few contrastive studies, the comparisons centre mainly ontwo texts, one in each language. To make a comprehensive contrastive analysis which links tothe factors of culture, politics and economy, this study explores the dynamic process ofconceptual metaphors beyond the previous studies which were only from a synchronicperspective.With an aim of identifying how bodily experience, social conditions and culturalbackgrounds impinge on the choice of conceptual metaphors in government reports, and whateffects the economic conditions and the shifts of values have on the diachronic shifts ofconceptual metaphors in each language, the writer of this study, by taking the methods ofcorpus-based analysis and Critical Metaphor Analysis, attempts to demonstrate the comparisonbetween American and Chinese government reports and explore the underlying reasons for thesimilarities and differences between the conceptual metaphors used in the government reports ofthe two countries.The corpus used in this study is taken from “The State of the Union Address” by theAmerican presidents and “The Report on the Work of the Government” by the Chinese Premiers,the most typical official texts among all political discourse. To ensure its validity, all of them aredownloaded from official websites. And both qualitative and quantitative methods are employedin this study. The qualitative method, as the dominant one, is used for the investigation ofconceptual metaphors according to the three procedures of Critical Metaphor Analysisintroduced by Charteris-Black (2004). And the quantitative method, which is used during thecollection procedure, makes use of Antconc3.2.2and ICTCLAS1.0to guarantee the reliabilityof the study.With a thorough examination of the corpus, the conclusion can be drawn from two aspects.Macroscopically speaking, the use of metaphorical expressions undergoes a dramatic changewhile the major keywords stay almost stable both in English and Chinese. The three mostimportant metaphorical categories, JOURNEY metaphors, BUILDING metaphors and WARmetaphors, are the same in both languages, which can be attributed to the similar bodilyexperience. And microscopically, BUSINESS metaphors and SPORTS metaphors are specific to American government reports, while in Chinese, CIRCLE metaphors are the unique category. InAmerican data, WEATHER metaphors are continuously growing while BUSINESS metaphorsare not so popular as before. In contrast, the percentage of WAR metaphors has been decliningdramatically, while MACHINE metaphors are more frequently used in Chinese. All of thecomparisons and diachronic shifts are linked to the cultural differences, social circumstances,economic conditions and the shifts of values in a country. The utilization of conceptualmetaphors in government reports has the function of persuading people, highlighting or hidingpolitical events, modulating the masses’ emotions as well as displaying the politicians’ attitudes.This study, by using the statistical tools of Antconc3.2.2and ICTCLAS1.0, fulfills thequantitative method in contrastive study, bridging the gap in previous studies which have failedto make diachronic analysis. Besides, the result of this study also shed light on some disciplinessuch as cross-cultural communication, translation studies, language teaching and thecomprehension of political language.