An Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors In TED Speeches

During the recent twenty years or so, there are tons of papers concerning conceptual metaphors. But up to now, there has never ever published any thesis whose focus is on the metaphors turning up in TED speech. TED speech provides people with rich and novel metaphor sources. As a result, the research takes the conceptual metaphors as the core theory and makes full use of the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to elaborate on the metaphors collected from TED Speech, especially the Entertainment Speech. In order to accomplish the goals, the main research questions to be solved in this thesis are listed as follows:(1) What are the frequently used metaphorical expressions in Entertainment Speech?(2) How many types of metaphor do Entertainment Speech embrace? What are they and how about their frequency of usage respectively?(3) What are the defining characteristics and pragmatical function of metaphors in Entertainment Speech?In this thesis, what is full of significance is the collection of data. Altogether,37entertainment speeches have been collected to serve as the corpus from Jan.2012to Apr.2014. After the assiduous effort, in total386sentences related to conceptual metaphors have been picked out and the connected metaphorical realizations have been sorted out. Based on the distinguished source domain, the corpus has been divided into11types, namely, container metaphor, time metaphor, up-down metaphor, journey metaphor, human metaphor, war metaphor, building metaphor, plant metaphor, liquid metaphor, food metaphor, and as well as machine metaphor. On the basis of this division, the author takes advantage of the qualitative analysis to elaborate on them respectively through some typical examples, and in the meantime the quantitative analysis is made use of to analyze the data. After the careful analysis, the metaphorical characteristics of entertainment speeches in TED have been tried to summarize. Among these11different types of conceptual metaphors, the top six types are as follows:container metaphor, which accounts for29.5%; up-down metaphor, whose percentage is up to16.6%; human metaphor, whose proportion is approximately16.3%; journey metaphor, which is about10.9%; war metaphor, with a proportion about9.6%; and time metaphor, which is a relative6%. Apparently, the frequency of these six types is much higher than the rest five.Through a careful analysis of the corpus, the defining characteristics of entertainment speeches in TED are boiled down to the following five points:(1) in container metaphor, people are always inclined to take the abstract stuff as the containers. It obviously shows us a fact that on the process of comprehending abstract stuff, the majority of people are likely to resort to the containers to ease the complexity of the comprehension.(2) The up metaphor is much more than the down metaphor, which states that nowadays people have already embraced this type of optimistic, positive and upward attitude towards life or they try to make themselves equip with this type of attitude.(3) among all the metaphorical expressions having been gathered with respect to human metaphors, verbs account for the biggest proportion. Hence, people tend to make use of the personal actions to describe some other things in order to bring life to them.(4) about the journey metaphor and war metaphor, the most common metaphors are related to path and process, which proves a fact that at present when people try to accomplish a goal, they prefer the process to the result.(5) last but not least, among the time metaphors, the number of metaphors which emphasize the statement that time is a moving object is much more than that of the metaphors which state that time is stationary and we human being are always moving. It is so apparent that most of the people share the similar viewpoint that time flies and people should cherish it.The significance of this study mainly consists in the practical aspect. It is full of importance to get an increasing number of people understand and make use of conceptual metaphors in the daily life. It highly contributes to enhancing the interpersonal relations. What’s more, without doubt, it is a magnificent platform for the fans of TED speech to immerse themselves in the state-of-the-art ideas all over the world, and it really does good to have a positive influence on their daily lives.