Interpretive Power Of Frame Theory For Persuasiveness Of Conceptual Metaphor In President Obama’s State Of The Union Address Of2013

The concept of frame, as an esstential notion in cognitive linguistics, is first introduced into the field of language study and matured by C.J Fillmore. Later researchers tend to regard frame as a cognitive schema which undergoes a gradual development in people’s minds when they are perceiving and experiencing a particular scene or event. The cognition about various events and experiences provided by this frame, in turn, establishes and buids up effective connection for people to understand known and unknown world or knowledge. By the same token, metaphor is also seen as another way of thinking for people to know about the world. Rooted in people’s cognitive minds, metaphor proves to be helpful when people make sense of the new world and distinguish every meaning of world existence. In this aspect, frame and metaphor do link with each other.Metaphor application is often substantially employed in various genres of discourses, especially in political discourses. Previous studies have pointed out that metaphors in political texts possess potent functions of ideology construction and persuasiveness. However, few researches nor systematic studies have ever been conducted on how metaphor realizes these functions. The author of the current paper learns from previous sparse literature that Lakoff once offered advisable approaches to probing into the ideology construction function of metaphor from frame theory perspective. Pitifully, his work, from a theoretical angle, merely looked at the single aspect of metaphor’s ideology function, leaving its persuasiveness untouched.Enlightened by Lakoff’s relevant researches, the present paper attempts to explore the persuasiveness of metaphor employed in political discourses from the perspective of frame theory, by setting American President Obama’s State of the Union Address (SUA) in2013as a case study. In this analysis, quantitative data are collected to identify the variety of metaphors and their distributions in the SUA, which is presented into tables and figures in detail.In addition, each kind of major metaphor is analyzed deeply on qualitative basis to investigate into their political connotations and persuasiveness depending on the two working mechanisms of frame theory:presupposition and foregrounding.Based on the above analysis, major findings of the study are concluded as follows: first, the current SUA of2013delivered by American President Obama is filled with aboundant and various metaphor types, including Journey Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Personification and Conflict Metaphor; Second, the overwhelming persuasiveness created by President Obama’s metaphor applications helps him to accomplish certain political ambitions like facilitating his promoting new policies and building up a favorable political image; Third, frame theory functions comprehensively to account for the persuasiveness of metaphor in political discourses. Also, as the two indispensable parts of frame theory, presupposition and foregrounding are the most effective means, in a cognitive sense, to provide a convincing explanation of the persuasiveness of metaphor in the president’s SUA.The initiative attempt of this paper presents certain significance of exploration, however, there are still some limitations remaining to be improved and studied in further researches.