Critical Discourse Analysis Of Metaphors In President George Bush’s Speeches Over Iraqi War

As an essential part in people’s cognitive mechanism, metaphor can constitute basicschema by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. That is tosay, metaphor can play an important role in our understanding of language and the worldwe describe through language. Powerful as it is, metaphor is pervasive in politicaldiscourses. The war in Iraq is a major event in President George Bush’s presidency. Hetakes advantages of extensive metaphors to elaborate on his political position and attitudetowards Iraqi War.The research takes the cognitive metaphor theory as well as critical discourseanalysis theory as its theoretical foundation and aims to investigate ideology constructionfunction and persuasive function of metaphor in political discourses by analyzingPresident George Bush’s speeches over Iraqi War. Specifically speaking, this researchmainly answers the following questions:(1) What kinds of metaphors does PresidentGeorge Bush use in his speeches over the Iraqi War?(2) How do those metaphors realizethe ideological construction function and persuasive function?(3) Through thosemetaphors, what kind of ideology does President George Bush try to construct?(4) Is itan objective presentation of the real world?Both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in the research.69transcriptsof President George Bush form the corpus and the words are about54000. The method toanalyze metaphor is Critical Metaphor Analysis, and it is divided into the following threestages: metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation.The study has arrived at the following findings:(1) President George Bush employsplenty of metaphors in his speeches over the Iraqi War including conflict metaphor,journey metaphor, personification, the moral accounting metaphor, build metaphor,illness metaphor, religion metaphor and fire and light metaphor, and metaphor density ofthe current corpus is16.09, which is at a comparatively high level;(2) The metaphorsused by President George Bush in the corpus have ideological construction function and persuasive function;(3) Through these metaphors, President George Bush tries toconstruct a political bias, namely the Iraqi war is against terrorism, which is a distortionof the facts.The study reveals and confirms that the integration of critical discourse analysis andmetaphor is feasible. The integration of both fields provides a new method for criticaldiscourse analysis, enriches the research of conceptual metaphor theory. The study canimprove people’s language appreciation ability, which is helpful to grasp the essence offacts through language phenomena; at the same time, it gives a warning to audiences toanalyze the facts objectively and adhere to right position.