A Study On Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese Political Addresses

For most people, metaphor is just a kind of rhetorical devices, just like simile, parallelism, exaggeration, serving as a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language, and being used for effects of the words. The focus of metaphor research was on the perspective of rhetoric, from300B.C. to1930s, covering over two thousand years; from1930s to1970s, most of the metaphor researches were conducted from the perspective of pragmatics; from then on, the metaphor study has been from the multidisciplinary perspective, including philosophy, pragmatics, semeiology, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, and so on. The theory of conceptual metaphor, advocated by Lakoff and Johnson, belongs to the metaphor researches from cognitive perspective. Since the theory of conceptual metaphor sprang up, the interpretation of metaphor has changed. Instead of a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish, metaphor is prevalent in our daily life, not just in language, but in thoughts and actions."Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature"(Lakoff and Johnson,1980).Lakoff and Johnson developed the theory of conceptual metaphor into a comprehensive system through theorizing the categories, the characteristics and mechanism of conceptual metaphor clearly, providing a foundation for analysis on various kinds of discourses from the perspective of conceptual metaphor, resulting from which, the study on the conceptual metaphor in discourses like political discourses, commercials and business letters, literature, dialogues, etc., has flourished. The study on political discourses has been conducted from various perspectives, which attracts people’s attention with the frequency of the interaction between different countries in the world. However, compared with the respective studies on the theory and political discourses, those on the conceptual metaphor of political discourses have a quite short history and inadequate results, especially in China, most of which focus on the first category of conceptual metaphor, namely the structural metaphor, with a lack of diachronic study on the conceptual metaphors occurring in the political discourses of nations with changing political focuses of the government and living background. And that is what the present thesis emphasizes on.This paper takes the conceptual metaphor theory advocated by Lakoff and Johnson in1980as the theoretical framework, and the public addresses of Chinese leaders at the National People’s Congress from1954to2013, in other words, from the First National People’s Congress to the latest Twelfth National People’s Congress, as the political discourses studied, which include two important addresses of leaders or one government work report at each National People’s Congress, to guarantee the equality in the length of chosen discourses of the NPC in different ages. Through diachronic comparison, the present paper is aiming at comparing the conceptual metaphors utilized in the Chinese political discourses in different ages to pursue the reasons hiding under the similarities and differences of the metaphor phenomena in the chosen discourses, as well as the evolution and development of the conceptual metaphors of Chinese language, indicating the constant changing of Chinese culture and people’s life, based on the analysis on the characteristics and mechanism of the metaphors existing in the chosen discourses respectively, according to the classification of conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), namely structural metaphors, orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors.