A Contrastive Study Of Megametaphors In Chinese And American National Leaders’ Political Speeches

Megametaphor, as a means of rhetoric, has long existed in both Chinese and Englishcommunication. Megametaphor is a complicated rhetoric means as well as a metaphoricalphenomenon of applying metaphors in chains and clusters within the text. Viewed from theperspective of conceptual meaning, megametaphor is precisely the main form for realizing textualmetaphor. In Chinese, megametaphor is generally called “连贯比” or “复喻”, which means todelineate the same tenor with a succession of vehicles.Based on the cognitive linguistics raised by Lakoff and Johnson,“metaphors are pervasive indaily life, not just in language but in thought and action”. Megametaphors, set in political discourses,are textual metaphors in essence. By using them, politicians express and visualize their politicalthoughts and views. Megametaphor has a great function to penetrate the metaphorical meaning intothe whole discourse, which can strongly highlight the themes.Presently, only a few scholars have conducted research on this topic and to a limited degree.Compared with the popularity of metaphor studies, megametaphor appears to be still obscure andneglected, not to mention the study relating megametaphor to political speeches. In recent years,several domestic scholars have started to show interest in megametaphor, especially Professor WeiJidong from Shanghai International Studies University. He systematically introduced megametaphorin textual metaphor and its meaning construction. This thesis, based on Lakoff’s ConceptualMetaphor Theory and the Megametaphor Theory of Professor Wei Jidong, conducts a contrastive study of megametaphors on Chinese national leader Xi Jinping and American national leaderBarack Obama’s political speeches, adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods. Thepurpose of the study is to find out the similarities and differences of megametaphors in Chinese andEnglish speeches as well as to reveal the functions of megametaphors in political speeches. Thisthesis mainly addresses four research questions:(1) In terms of the classifications of megametaphors, what types of megametaphors are used inChinese and English speeches and what are their frequencies?(2) In which type of speeches are megametaphors of more considerable significance?(3) What are the similarities and differences in the usage of megametaphors between Chineseand English speeches?(4) What are the functions of megametaphors in political language?The statistical analysis in this thesis shows:(1) There are extended-type megametaphors andparallel-type megametaphors in both data. The extended-type megametaphors are the mostfrequently used types in both data.(2) In terms of the speech types, megametaphors are of moreconsiderable significance in persuasive speech types with the aim to convince people or inspirepeople to take action.(3) The extended-type megametaphors occur most frequently in both data,forming the main similarity between them. The megametaphors in Chinese data are primarilylexical metaphors while the megametaphors in English data are grammatical metaphors, which isthe major difference between them.(4) There are three basic functions of megametaphors in theChinese and American political languages. They are cognitive function, persuasive function andaesthetic function.