A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of American President Obama's Weekly Video Addresses

The studies on metaphor have a long history. Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA) is a new approach to studying metaphor from the cognitive perspective. The study on metaphor from the cognitive perspective mainly focuses on the selection and use of metaphor and disclose the hidden political purposes. The studies on political discourse by the approach of CMA at home start late and are not sufficient and systemic. American president's Weekly Video Addresses(WVA) have the specialties that the range of audiences are wider and the addresses are easy to access, so the addresses have the strong and direct influence on the audiences. Based on the two factors above, this thesis adopts the approach of CMA to analyze WVA, explores the selection and use of metaphor in political discourses, and clarifies the pragmatic and cognitive mechanism of metaphor on the basis of conceptual metaphor.This thesis builds up a corpus on 48 American President Obama's WVA that are addressed after Obama becomes the president in 2009. Then the collected data is analyzed through employing Chateris-Black's approach of CMA, which includes three steps: metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. First of all, the author uses software Wmatrix3 to search and find out the candidate metaphors from the self-built corpus.After identifying the metaphor keywords, the author uses word processing software Excel to count the number of metaphor keywords. Secondly, combined with the specific context, the types and frequency of metaphors are identified and conclusion of the main types of metaphors is drawn by qualitative methods with statistical analysis of the data. Finally, taking the specific social, historical and cultural factors and context into account, this thesis analyzes the statistical results and reveals the potential purposes and ideologies.According to the statistical results, Obama widely adopts 17 types of metaphors in his WVA in 2009. Most frequently used metaphors are conflict metaphors, journey metaphors,building metaphors, sports game metaphors, illness and health metaphors, which take up 90%of all resonance. By analysis of the corpus, five main conceptual metaphors are contained incollected metaphors. Different metaphors adopted in the WVA express different valuation of politicians. Furthermore, different metaphors adopted in the WVA satisfy the political needs of ruling party. In this kind of political discourse, the main function of conceptual metaphor is to motivate and persuade. This thesis provides the understanding of the selection and use of metaphor from cognitive prospect and help listeners to understand the hidden political purpose and intention from high level.