A Contrastive Analysis Of Frames Constructed By Republicans And Democrats On Immigration Issue

Since politics and language interact intimately and cannot be separated, political language has attracted much interest in the field of linguistics. In recent years, cognitive linguistics has grown rapidly and brought a new perspective to political language analysis.In the US, immigration has been a controversial issue for years. Republicans and Democrats have largely expressed their own political views on this issue. Thus this thesis aims to undertake a cognitive analysis of speeches on Republicans’ speeches on immigration issue and those given by Democrats.Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, this thesis makes an analysis of Bush’s and Obama’s immigration speeches by using Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Framing Theory. Republican corpora consist of ten transcripts of Bush’s speeches on immigration issue, containing 35,126 words while Democrat corpora consist of seven transcripts of Obama’s speeches on immigration issue,19,171 words in total. By analyzing word frequencies with the use of software "AntConc", this study first analyzes metaphors and frames activated by Republicans and Democrats, and then makes a contrastive study of them. The similarities and differences furthermore suggest that they have distinct core values and moralities under the same value system.The findings show even though two parties are talking about the same set of values, their arguments and attitudes are divided from each other. Republicans stick to Strict Father family model and dominant frames on Republicans side are Criminal Frame, Security Frame and Deceitful Worker Frame. Thus for years, Republicans have been insisting that immigrants who break the law should be severely punished and border security remains a matter of vital importance. While Democrats fit into Nurturant Parent family model and their core values are articulated by setting up American Dream Frame, Driving-force Frame and Unscrupulous Employer Frame. The Democrats have been taking steps on the road to Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which suggests offering unauthorized immigrants an appropriate path to citizenship. Both parties constitute their respective moral worldview and political philosophy, hence control public opinions.