A Cognitive Study On The Political Metaphors In The House Of Cards

According to the plenty of studies of the linguists, we can see that the metaphor not only is a method of rhetoric, but is an important way of thinking and mechanism of thinking. The metaphor is closely related to the politics. In order to make the people accept the strategies and the value, and have the same ideology, the politicians must apply an easy and specific way to represent the abstract political concepts. Jeffery holds that the metaphor can provide effective solutions for the political events. All the politicians hope that their people can accept their views. Moreover, Stone has also ever related the political problems to the statement of stories. He thinks that in the process of analyzing the political strategies, the metaphor can be an important method to reappear the strategy. Superficially, the metaphor merely connects two simple things, but in fact, the metaphor implies a narrative story and a strategy of action. Miller thinks that the political event can not be perceived by people directly, thus it is necessary to make a definition for it by means of using the metaphor.According to the studies made by predecessors, people made fewer studies than those made in other fields, and fewer studies on the metaphor in the language in a sitcom, let alone the studies on the metaphor in political language. In resent years, the American sitcoms become more and more popular with the people, many scholars began to make lots of studies on the metaphor used in the language of a sitcom. But there are very few studies on the language or the political language from the perspective of using the metaphor. And different scholars made several different categorizations of the metaphor. According to the categorizations of the metaphor made by the Lakoff and Johnson, there are three categories:the structural metaphor, the ontological metaphor and the orientational metaphor. (Lakoff,1980) According to the relations between the language, thought and the metaphor, this thesis made a study on the language of House of Cards based on these three categories, to try to understand the politicians’intentions deeply. According to the analysis on the metaphor in the language of the House of Cards from the cognitive view, we can see the reason why the politicians would like to apply metaphor in their speeches and the functions of the metaphor in the political language. The metaphor is very significant for the politicians, they can persuade people to support their views and arousing people’s feeling to resonance with them.This thesis includes three parts:the introduction part, the body part, and the conclusion part.The introduction part outlines the background of the conceptual metaphor and gives a brief introduction to the motivations of the author to choose this topic and the significance of the topic.The body part includes four chapters. Chapter one introduces the traditional study and the cognitive study of the metaphor. Then the author briefly introduces the situation of the study on the metaphor at home and abroad. The study of the metaphor from the aspect of the traditional metaphor includes three aspects:from the rhetoric view, from the semantic view and from the interdisciplinary view. And the aspect of the cognitive metaphor is mainly according to the conceptual metaphor of Lakoff and Johnson to express the metaphor and its mechanism. Chapter two firstly gives a brief description to the corpus of the House of Cards and describes the features of the language in House of Cards. And then the author introduces the categories of the metaphor made by different linguists. At last, the relations between language and thought, language and metaphor, metaphor and thought, language and politics, and politics and metaphor will be introduced, which will pave the way for the following study. In the third chapter, the author makes use of specific examples in the House of Cards to make detailed analysis on the application of the metaphor in the political language, which points out the mechanisms of the metaphor. In this chapter, the author makes a study on the metaphor mainly according to the classifications of the conceptual metaphor of Lakoff and Johnson and other linguists’ classifications of metaphor. Under the frame of the structural metaphor, the ontological metaphor and the orientational metaphor, the metaphor can also be classified into building metaphor, time metaphor, traffic metaphor, color metaphor, family metaphor, substance metaphor, container metaphor and nature metaphor and so on. In the forth chapter, the author makes a conclusion about the role the metaphor plays in the political language according to the analysis on the chapter three. And the author states the reason why the politicians would like to apply a lot of metaphor in their speeches. The functions of the metaphor in the political language include the frame and filter function, the lobbying and persuasive function and the Reasoning and evaluating function.The conclusion part introduces the main findings, the important meaning to the study and the limits and defects. The study on the metaphor in the language in the House of Cards shows that the metaphor exists everywhere in our daily life, and the metaphor and the politics have very close relation. In this thesis, the author pointed the working mechanism of the metaphor according to the study on the metaphor in House of Cards, in order to make people have a better understanding to the metaphor under the view of cognition, and thus have a deeper knowledge of the metaphor in the political language. And this study has a practical significance to the English teaching and learning the culture of English speaking countries. But there still exist many limits and defects in this study which need to improve in further efforts.