A Contrastive Study On The Impact Of Economic Background On Conceptual Metaphors Used In American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Presidential inaugural address is one of the speeches that have the largest audience and the profoundest influence, and is a vital moment for the newly-elected President to foster a good and healthy image. And the Presidents usually take this opportunity to make full use of the selecting, reasoning and persuading functions of language to win the support from the public, making preparation for future political activities. Presidential inaugural address aims at moulding public opinion, calling on public actions and shaping the social ideology, so that it can facilitate Presidents to achieve their goals. On the fact of that, the presidential inaugural address is of great value to linguistic research.Cognitive linguistics believes that metaphor concerns not only language but also human’s cognition and behaviors, and is pervasively rooted in our language and thought. What’s more, we perceive and understand experience and knowledge via metaphor. Conceptual metaphor is widely used in presidential inaugural addresses since it is good at making explanation, selecting and persuading. As a result, it’s feasible and indispensable to analyze presidential inaugural addresses on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Since the conceptual metaphor theory was put forward in1980, researches on metaphor have undergone a profound change, but most of them are theoretical studies. The application researches so far include case studies and diachronic studies on conceptual metaphors used in English or Chinese political discourses, and contrastive studies between metaphors used in Chinese and in English politics and so on. However, there are few comparative studies on the effect of social environments on the use of conceptual metaphors in political discourses. So this thesis attempts to conduct a comparative study from the diachronically perspective on American presidential inaugural addresses based on conceptual metaphor theory in an effort to uncover the similarities and the dissimilarities of the metaphors used in addresses delivered during economic crises and during prosperous periods, and then to give explanations to them.Since1900America has experienced10economic crises among which three witnessed the election of new President. Those Presidents are Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. On the other hand, in order to make a comparison, we choose the presidential inaugural addresses of Lyndon Baines Johnsen, William Jefferson Clinton and George Walker Bush who took office in economic boom periods.The study reveals that the metaphors used in addresses delivered in different economic situations are similar, but they are different in the frequency of occurrence. The frequency of occurrence of orientational metaphors used during economic crises is two times more than that in prosperous periods. These metaphors are used mainly to construct a fair and firm relationship, to describe the severe economic situations and to declare the responsibilities of the governments. Since will and faith are strong metal power which can get people through hardness, addresses in crises tend to take mental states as entities to rouse great determination from the public to overcome the crises. As to structure metaphor, addresses under different economic conditions employed the same target domain or the same source domain, or even used both the same target domain and the same source domain. However, they are realized via the mapping of different entities in one domain onto those in another. Those different choices of metaphors are closely related to the Presidents’communicative purposes, and reflect to a certain degree their psychological constitutions.In addition, when sorting the metaphors used in our data, we find that those three types of conceptual metaphors classified by Lakoff overlap with each other, which brings difficulties to us in classifying some metaphorical expressions. The classification of the metaphors is the preparation for the following comparative work, so it’s necessary for us to illustrate the overlaps and to clarify the standards of classification in this paper. By that we try to provide some limited improvement to the theoretical research.