The Metaphor Study Of Xi Jinping's Speeches Based On The Corpus

Although utilizing the metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics to analyze political discourses have been a hot spot of cross-specialty research, the metaphor study of Xi Jinping's speeches was still at an initial stage. This article set up a corpus of Xi Jinping's speeches, which totally had 400,000 words, to analyze the metaphor of these speeches, and had generalized ten typical conceptual metaphors which was journey metaphor, war metaphor, family metaphor,body metaphor, ship metaphor, illness metaphor, project metaphor, animal metaphor, plant metaphor, and weather-season metaphor. The utilization frequencies, linguistic forms, mapping relationships, and cognitive bases of each metaphor type were also revealed in the article.Among these metaphor types, the utilization rate of journey metaphor, war metaphor, family metaphor, body metaphor was high, which presented a positive correlation with ideology. The utilization rate of illness metaphor, project metaphor, animal metaphor and weather-season metaphor was low, though it was closely tied to the Party's work focus at present stage.Meanwhile, this research found that metaphors of Xi Jinping's speeches had characteristics as inheritance and development, and displayed three pragmatic functions which were heuristic function, rhetorical function and social function. Heuristic function made the abstract political concept concretely and visually; embellished function made political language vividly,euphemistically and novelly; social function provided new idea for providing writing style of false, big and empty.And this paper summarized utilization skills of metaphors in Xi Jinping's speeches, which were thinking skill, language skill and using occasions, that gave some references for secretary to write speeches for the leaders.