Critical Metaphor Analysis Of American Political Discourse

The study of metaphors dates back to Aristotle in ancient Greece, when metaphor is regarded as a means of rhetoric, a device to decorate language. This view has a profound influence on the later studies on metaphors, and for a long time metaphor study has been confined to rhetoric. Since Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live by in1980, metaphor has been regarded as a widely-present cognitive mechanism for people to conceptualize the complex and the abstract in terms of the simple and the concrete. Embodied experience is the basis to generate metaphors.Politics is a highly complicated experience of human beings. The employment of metaphors will undoubtedly simplify those complexities and facilitate people’s understanding of politics. As a cognitive mechanism, metaphor provides a way of seeing the world. When metaphor highlights some aspects of the source domain, it will undoubtedly hide other aspects of the source domain. Metaphor is pervasive in political discourse. Presidential campaign speech is a kind of typical political discourse. Therefore, politicians in presidential campaign speeches will use metaphors to convey their values and realize their political purposes.Previous studies on metaphors in political discourse focus on metaphor interpretation and metaphor classification but the motivation for politicians to choose specific metaphors lacks in-depth explanation. In addition, previous studies mainly summarize the similarities of metaphors used by politicians, and there is relatively little research on the differences, particularly the comparative study of metaphors used by politicians in the same culture.The corpora in this thesis are made up of the U.S. presidential campaign speeches in2012. The thesis adopts Critical Metaphor Analysis proposed by Charteris-Black to analyze metaphors in the corpora—metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. Corpus analysis tool—Wmatrix3is employed. It is mainly used to make a full search of metaphor types and metaphor tokens in the source domain. Quantitative and qualitative research methods are used and qualitative research is the main methodology.The research finds out that there is a remarkable similarity in metaphor choice for Obama and Romney. There are dominant metaphor types in the corpora:conflict metaphors, journey metaphors, building metaphors, sports game metaphors, personification, family metaphors and organism metaphors. Moreover, religion metaphors, disease metaphors and orientational metaphors are also important metaphor types in the corpora. Based on the formula to calculate the productivity of metaphors proposed by Charteris-Black—metaphor resonance=E type*Σtoken, the most resonant metaphors in the corpora are conflict metaphors, journey metaphors and building metaphors, which account for70%of the total resonance of metaphors. Although Obama and Romney choose the same source domain to conceptualize different phenomena in politics, they highlight different aspects in the source domain for different purposes. Their similar metaphor choice can be explained by their similar cultural background, such as religion background, historical experiences and collective cognition of America as the leader in the world. Highlighting different aspects in the same source domain can be explained by their different family moral values and reasoning patterns. Different metaphors interacting with each other forms metaphor clusters, which helps create different political myth. Politicians’metaphor choices reflect their different values and ideologies.