Construction And Realization Of Metaphors In Chinese And American Economic Political Discourse

Metaphor has been regarded as a rhetorical device since long. However, with thedevelopment of linguistics, cognitive linguists believe metaphor is not only a languagephenomenon, but a way of thinking and cognition to conceptualize the world. Politicaldiscourse is a kind of social activity carried by politicians under certain socialcircumstances and for a particular purpose. Most of the information in political discourseis complicated and abstract to the public and thus a great quantity of metaphors is utilizedto make economic concepts understandable. Economic political discourse is particularlysignificant among all types of political discourse as economy is concerned with a nation’sstability and development. The thesis, on the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory andConceptual Integration Theory, sets an attempt to construct a theoretical model to interpretmetaphorical phenomenon in economic political discourse, stressing the dynamic processof metaphorical meaning construction, highlighting the function of background knowledgeto the selection of elements in a metaphor, and expounding differences among metaphors.The model aims to fill the gap of the two theories in expounding the specificity ofmetaphorical phenomenon.National annual economic report serves as an important reference to judge currenteconomic situation, to conclude economic performance of previous year, to make plan foreconomic development and to deploy economic work for the next year. Languagecharacteristics of economic report are embodied by authenticity, formality and authority;meanwhile, plenty of metaphors are usually employed to construct certain abstracteconomic concepts in both Chinese and American data. As a result, how to interpret theeconomic terms and concepts in a proper way is a new topic for researchers in languagefield to face.The research in the thesis is carried out following three steps: firstly, to collectmetaphors in Chinese and American data and categorize them according to source domainconcepts; furthermore, to abstract and analyze the dominant conceptual metaphors in bothdata by utilizing the new model; finally, to contrastively analyze differences in theutilization of conceptual metaphor in Chinese and American data as well as to expound the reasons. Differences in Chinese and American culture are discovered through contrastiveanalysis of metaphors in the two data, which, at the same time, verifies the rationality ofthe new model generated in the thesis.As two important cognitive theories, conceptual integration theory derives anddevelops from conceptual metaphor theory. However, the two theories ignore the dynamicprocess of meaning in analyzing metaphors. The model generated in the thesis makessome improvements in this respect and contributes to the public’s better understanding ofobscure and abstract economic concepts in economic political discourse, which thus betterpromotes the overall understanding of related discourse.