| The study of metaphor has lasted a long time, which, at the earliest, could trace back to Aristotle. The traditional research just regarded metaphor as a figure of speech, and then George Lakoff provided a brand new explanation of metaphor as a way of thinking, holding that the metaphor is a basic, universal cognitive style, which incorporates metaphor study formally into the cognitive science. Contemporary metaphor research holds that, not only as a rhetorical phenomenon, but a basic, universal human cognitive style to experience and understand the world, metaphor can be used to explain the formation of the concept, the process of thinking, cognitive development in people's brains and the basis for behaviors. Metaphor can reflect emotion, attitude and conceptualized process of the speakers. Thus metaphor research matters much for a better understanding of the speakers' emotions, attitudes and intentions. In 2004, Charteris-Black proposed critical metaphor analysis, a combination of corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics, to explore and reveal the hidden attitudes, values and governing ideas behind the political discourse. In Chinese Cognitive Linguistics in two decades- Review and Reflection, Shu Dingfang pointed out that some studies stay in the low-level repeated introduction, with a lack of systematic and innovative research combining Chinese language reality and linguistic data. Besides, the existing metaphor studies mostly direct at English political discourses while the study of metaphor in Chinese political discourses is still meager.However, with the rapid development and further opening up, China plays an increasingly important role in the international arena, which draws much more attention from the outside world. And the outside world expects to know more about China, especially its remarkable achievements in the development process of the country. With plain and rigorous language, objective and neutral tone, Chinese Government Work Report is highly authoritative and representative political discourse, ideal analytic linguistic data to timely and accurately reflect the government's ruling philosophy and values. As the first answer paper submitted by the new term Chinese government with Li Keqiang as the prime ministry, Chinese Government Work Report in 2014 draws a great deal of attention. With Chinese Government Work Report in 2014(the Chinese version with total 16907 words, English version with total 11093 words) as research linguistic data, this paper is designed to analyze the use of metaphors and attempt to reveal the hidden information such as attitudes, values and governing ideas and the factors influencing the selection of metaphors. This paper is expected to provide support for both conceptual metaphor theory and critical metaphor analysis, and help the audience to get a better and much more comprehensive understanding of the lines, principles and policies carried out by Chinese Communist Party and the government. Through the analysis of metaphors in this thesis, it is found that metaphor has a wide distribution in Chinese Government Work Report in 2014. There are mainly seven classifications of metaphors, namely construction metaphor, journey metaphor, war metaphor, game metaphor, family metaphor, plant metaphor and body metaphor. Among them, journey metaphor and construction metaphor are the most frequently used, which together highlight the fact that China is a developing country with the most important task is to develop, the urgent need for peaceful and stable environment at home at abroad. At the same time, the three kinds of the most frequently used metaphors also emphasize the long-term and complexity of development, which means the whole Chinese people must keep patient, persevering and vigilant at every moment in case of any accident during the process of development. |
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