A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Campus Speeches Delivered By Chinese And American Leaders

Metaphor is regarded as a linguistic phenomenon and a figure of speech from the traditional viewpoint in west. The publication of the book Metaphor We Live by marked the shift of study on metaphor from traditional rhetorical perspective to cognitive perspective. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), conceptual metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life and exists in our language and thought. In nature, metaphor is a cognitive activity of understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.Aristotle argued that political speech is a kind of effective social political means, which can be used for political purposes. Scholars had been researching political languages from the perspective of rhetoric and pragmatics from Aristotle’s time till1980’s. In recent decades, with the rising of cognitive linguistics, a great number of scholars have studied political language on the basis of metaphor. The campus speech with motivational, targeted and persuasive characteristics, etc made by national leader belongs to political discourse. The study of this kind political discourse from the perspective of conceptual metaphor improves the Chinese people’s awareness of American culture and provides access to the intention of the U.S in political, economical and other fields.The discourses used in this thesis are public speeches made by American and Chinese national leaders on different campuses in different countries. This paper makes a contrastive analysis of the category and frequency of using metaphor in campus speeches made by national leaders based on conceptual metaphor theory put forwarded by Lakoff and find out the similarities and differences in both discourses; what’s more, the author tries to discuss the reasons for causing similarities and differences. The statistics in this study indicates that there are top five common metaphors in both discourses:Human metaphor, Journey metaphor, Building metaphor, Plant metaphor, Nature metaphor and War metaphor. The unique conceptual metaphors in Chinese campus speeches are circle metaphor and chess metaphor, while tie metaphor and drama metaphor are particular to American campus speeches. The reasons for the similarities are people share the similar physical experience and cognition to the world. Differences result from different aspects of deep culture in American and China, which are embodied in the aspects of history, political system and values etc. The study also finds both the Chinese leaders and American leaders prefer to deliver their abstract political standpoints and desire by employing a large number of conceptual metaphors in order to effectively express their political ideas and achieve the purpose of communicating and motivating the audience.