Metaphor In The "Strict Father" And "Nurturant Parent" Cognitive Models: A Case Study Of The2012US Presidential Debates

Based on the data from three televised debates between Barack Obama and MittRomney, the two candidates for US president in2012, this thesis mainly explores themetaphorical components of the “Strict Father”(SF) and “Nurturant Parent”(NP)cognitive models of moral and political systems. As a supplementary study ofmetaphors from perspectives of cognition and Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), thepresent study, focusing on both metaphoric words and gestures, further investigates themetaphorical composition in these debates and the way metaphors are expressed.Through analyzing conceptual metaphors, metaphorical and non-metaphoricalexpressions that constitute entailments of the SF and NP models as well as thecandidates’ metaphoric gestures in the third debate, the ideological differencesbetween the two speakers get well identified; meanwhile, the two cognitive modelsproposed by Lakoff get further confirmed. Moreover, the results of this study showthat quantitative analysis produced results in line with the linguistic analysis, namelyObama prefers NP cognitive model while Romney prefers SF cognitive model;however, qualitative analysis highlighted significant differences between the twocognitive models.This thesis makes its contribution to metaphor research from a new perspective.At the same time, it practices the new theoretical approach—Critical MetaphorAnalysis (CMA) approach to identifying and labeling SF and NP metaphors. It alsohighlights the theoretical status of SF and NP cognitive models as well as theimportance of the cognitive linguistics in political analysis.