A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Chinese Leaders' Campus Speeches

Since two thousand years ago,metaphor has been explored in various language fields by different scholars.The traditional metaphor theory holds the view that metaphor is just a matter of language phenomenon and rhetorical device.Then with the publication of Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff &Johnson in 1980,it allowed researchers to turn the direction of metaphor studies into cognitive researches.And metaphor is not just a matter of language phenomenon,but more importantly a humanity's cognition phenomenon,which uses one domain experience to show or understand another domain experience.Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA for short)is a new metaphor analysis proposed by Charteris-Black in his book Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis(2004).It aims to use a combination of critical discourse analysis,corpus analysis,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics to analyze metaphors in special text and take a deep insight into attitudes,beliefs,hidden ideologies and feelings of the discourse community in which they occur.The pragmatic aspect of Critical Metaphor Analysis refers to how do metaphors influence others and why people choose different types of metaphors to convey messages and express their feelings.Campus speech is a carrier of national ideology and political intention and of great help in persuading listeners to approve and support the politician's view.So campus speech plays a vital role in the study of national ideology and culture.Until now,there are not many studies on Chinese campus speeches which are made under the cross-cultural context.As an important form of political speech,campus speech is of great significance in delivering political intentions and different cultural concepts.This thesis conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the metaphors in12 pieces of campus speeches made by Chinese leaders.This thesis adopts the three-step procedure of critical metaphor analysis: metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation and aims at solving three major problems as follows:1.What are the typical metaphors existing in the Chinese presidents' campusspeeches?2.How do metaphors work and serve for ideology and political intentions and construct identity?3.What are the major factors influencing choice-making of metaphors?The major findings can be concluded: firstly,Metaphor is ubiquitous and frequently applied in campus lectures.There are five typical metaphors existing in this thesis which can be classified as journey metaphor,family metaphor,building metaphor,war metaphor and poetic prose metaphor according to the frequent usage.Among them,the poetic prose metaphor is the characteristic Chinese metaphor due to the traditional culture and history.Secondly,on the one hand,metaphor can reveal the hidden ideology,arouse the listeners' attention and make strongly impact on cognitive models.On the other hand,metaphor helps to construct identity by selectively using a mapping from the source domain to the target domain to highlight some traits.Four identity construction are achieved in the thesis: pioneer for the trip to peaceful development;sincere and long-term friend;cooperator for national construction and fighter for economy's development.Thirdly,metaphors and ideology are interrelated;metaphors can explore deep ideology,and ideology,in turn,strongly affects the choice-making of metaphors.Culture and history also influence the frequency of use of different types of metaphors.After all,this research enriches the study of critical metaphor analysis of Chinese speeches and helps to arouse people's critical sensitiveness of the political speeches.