| Since the 1990s, there appears a cognitive turn in the field of western linguistics, rhetoric and narratology. Stylistics has long been focusing on the relationship between language form and the effect it produces. Cognitive stylisticians, not only pay attention to the choice of language, but concerns more on cognitive construct and cognitive process which is related to language choices, so as to give systematic explanation of the relationship between texts and understanding of texts. In other words, cognitive stylistic reveals on the psychological effect based on the cognitive models and language characteristics.Political discourse plays an important role in expressing political views, propagandizing political idea, forming guidance of public opinion and constructing mass psychology. The researches on political discourse are numerous, but most of which are from the perspectives of systematic functional linguistics and rhetoric. In this thesis, the author carried out discourse analysis from the perspectives of conceptual metaphor and foregrounding, by selecting sixty three speeches of the Queen's Christmas Broadcasts from 1952 to 2014 and combining the quantitative and qualitative methods. Firstly, case studies are carried out to analyze Queen's Christmas Broadcasts from the perspectives of orientational metaphors, ontological metaphors and structural metaphors. Then foregrounding of themes expressed in Queen's Christmas Broadcasts will be analyzed in detail.Through the above analysis, two findings have been drawn. Firstly, in the British Queen's Christmas Broadcasts, there mainly exists eight kinds of metaphors. Based on the formula to calculate the productivity of metaphors proposed by Charteris-metaphor resonance=? type*? token, the most resonant metaphors in the Queen's Christmas Broadcasts are human metaphors, journey metaphors and family metaphors, which account for 85% of the total resonance of metaphors. As a result, a positive image of the Commonwealth is established by human metaphor; bright prospects and a tortuous path of development is revealed by journey metaphor; a family image of the Commonwealth is shaped by family metaphor. Secondly, each Christmas Broadcast is featured with a specific theme which covers topics such as unity, peace, war, faith and development etc, which is foregrounded through parallelism and deviation. Moreover, by the cognitive stylistic analysis of the Queen's Christmas Broadcasts, not only helps receiver understand the political discourse better, but also help English learners get more understanding of western culture and provide help for their study towards political discourse. |
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