A Comparative Study Of Ideologies In Roosevelt’s And Obama’s Speeches

Metaphor and political speeches are closely connected. The politicians exploit metaphors in their speeches to cerate an image of reliability, morality and integrity to gain the support from or get closer to the audiences. Thus, metaphor is a powerful tool for politicians to exercise power and build relations. Being persuasive, emotive and evaluative in nature, metaphor is effective in ideologies shaping. The metaphor choice in particular situation is motivated by ideology. By analyzing metaphor critically helps to uncover the hiding ideologies of the speaker.Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) is an interdisciplinary approach which analyzes metaphor linguistically, cognitively and pragmatically. Its purpose is to identify the motivations and ideologies behind language use. The analysis process of CMA includes metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. By applying Critical Metaphor Analysis approach, the paper mainly investigates economic metaphors in President Roosevelt’s and President Obama’s speeches on economic crisis during the Great Depression and the economic recession respectively on a comparative basis in an attempt to uncover the hidden ideologies in their speeches. Firstly, metaphors on economy in Roosevelt’s and Obama’s speeches are identified by checking whether the words or phrases conceptualizing "economy" or economic topic cause semantic tension. Secondly, ideologies behind metaphors presented in both presidents’ speeches are critically analyzed and compared. Finally, the reasons for different metaphor choices are discussed and explained. The main findings are:1) both Presidents adopted the VEHICLE metaphor to make clear the current situation and the CONSTRUCTION metaphor to articulate their policy; both of them made efforts to take actions to solve the current problems and asked the Congress to legitimate their policy, constructing themselves as the active doer of the current situation.2) However, they are different at large. As for Roosevelt, he used the NATURE metaphor and the WAR metaphor to characterize the crisis and manage recovery expectations, thus he created ideologies of materialism and power management and constructed himself as the leader of the new government. Obama adopted the PERSON metaphor and the JOURNEY metaphor to characterize the crisis and manage recovery expectations, creating ideologies of humanism and egalitarianism and constructing himself as the guider as well as the companion of the American people.3) The dominant ideology presented by Roosevelt is power management while Obama tended to care more about his policy’s legitimization.4) The study improves that Critical Metaphor Analysis is an effective approach to discourse analysis.