A Contrastive Analysis Of Metaphors And Moral Models In American Political Discourses

Political speech is an important form of public discourses. In the past, researches on political speech were conducted from perspectives such as rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In recent years, there is a cognitive tendency. Lakoff (2002,2004,2008), together with a group of cognitive linguists, has been studying political speeches in the framework of Conceptual Metaphor theory (CM) and family-based moral models. He infers a close link between American political parties’ political notions and family-based moral models, opening a new perspective for future studies in this field. However, most of the previous analysis are based on introspection rather than linguistic data.This thesis will adopt both qualitative and quantitative methods to systematically analyze the conceptual metaphors and family-based moral models in Obama and Bush’s speeches on tax in a contrastive way. CM and family-based moral models will be used as the theoretical foundation. Obama’s corpus comprises of 18 transcripts of speeches on tax, a total of 14,922 words. Bush’s corpus comprises of 10 transcripts of speeches on tax, a total of 15,503 words. This thesis studies the conceptual metaphors and moral models in Obama and Bush’s speeches on tax with the corpus approach and the cognitive approaches, and come to the following major findings.The metaphor densities of Obama’s and Bush’s corpora are 14 and 14.33 respectively, which shows the ubiquity of metaphor in political speeches; the moral values behind the metaphorical expressions in Obama’s corpus have high unity with the Nurturant Parent Moral Model, while those behind the metaphorical expressions in Bush’s corpus has high unity with the Strict Father Moral Model, but on the whole, the latter has higher unity than the former; Bush is more goal-oriented in using metaphors to propagate his tax policy. To sum up, Bush’s speeches on tax may enjoy higher acceptability than Obama’s.