A Contrastive Study Of Political Metaphors In Chinese And American Diplomatic Discourse

The study of metaphor can be traced back to Ancient Greek times. Traditionally, metaphor is thought to be a figure of speech, an ornament to language. While the contemporary metaphor researchers have shifted their attention to the cognitive study of metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson(1980:3) hold the viewpoint that metaphor is pervasive in daily life, not just in language but in thought and action and our conceptual system is metaphorical in essence. According to this viewpoint, political language is also metaphorical in nature. In recent years, Lakoff has made some researches on American political conceptual metaphors, such as terrorism metaphors, war metaphors, metaphors in foreign affairs, etc. However, few systematic metaphorical studies on political discourse are made so far, regardless of Lakoff’s efforts on political metaphors. Contrastive studies of political metaphors in different countries even remain fewer. Therefore, on the basis of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this dissertation makes such an attempt to do a contrastive study of political metaphors in Chinese and American diplomatic discourse-based on South China Sea dispute.Based on language materials of 12514 words in the American discourse and 11058 characters in the Chinese discourse, the research is carried out with the discourse of South China Sea dispute as its study material. The objectives of the contrastive analysis are to find out the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American diplomatic speeches and distill the underlying reasons. By applying Steen’s “Five-step” metaphor identification to identify the conceptual metaphors, the thesis conducts a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors between the two languages. After a contrastive study of the discourse, the results are as follows:(1) In Chinese discourse, there are six categories of conceptual metaphors including Journey, Human, War, Circle, Drama and Building Metaphors. In American discourse, there are six categories of conceptual metaphors including War, Journey, Family, Building, Driving and Human Metaphors. It is easily found that four categories of conceptual metaphors, Journey, Building, Human and War metaphors, exist in Chinese and American discourse simultaneously. At the same time, it is Drama and Circle metaphors that are unique to Chinese discourse, Family and Driving metaphors to American discourse.(2) On the one hand, the similarities of the conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American discourse lie in the experiential bases in which they live in. Chinese and American are all human beings with some common properties. Since two countries’ people own the same or similar embodied experiences in which human cognition is rooted. It is no surprise that they share the same or similar conceptual structures. On the other hand, the differences of the conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American discourse lie in different cultural backgrounds and main social values which have great influence on their thinking, cognition and concept grounding. So it is no wonder that people from different cultural environment employ different conceptual metaphors to state their thoughts and communicate with the world.The author hopes that it can offer some help to the study of political metaphor in the future and advance Chinese and American cultural communication. However, the thesis is just an attempt to the study of conceptual metaphors in political discourse. There are still some drawbacks. The author hopes that more research can be carried out in the future.