Features Of Metaphor-based Expressions On The Health Care Issue

The study of cognitive metaphor has been a hot topic in academic circle home and abroad since 1980s.Even though it has been more than 30 years,cognitive metaphor is still of great interest to researchers.With the development of corpus linguistics,the study of metaphor has entered a new phase,when researchers abroad have adopted the corpus-based research approach to analyze metaphors and have made many achievements.However,taking a wide review of domestic literature,the author finds that most domestic study of cognitive metaphors still follows the old-fashioned method,which has two problems,of which one is that metaphor identification greatly depends on researchers' subjective perception,the other is that many metaphor analyses are lack of support from empirical data.Thus,the biggest highlights of this thesis are its research methods,including the adoption of the latest achievement,MIP(Metaphor Identification Procedure),to judge linguistic metaphors and the use of corpus-based research method to analyze the self-built corpus,of which MIP helps to reduce the subjectivity in metaphor identification while the corpus-based method contributes to receiving many authentic and objective empirical-data.All the texts in this corpus come from President Obama's weekly addresses since he took office from 2009 to January 31,2016.All share the same topic "health care reform",and the total number of the valid texts is 22.After careful analysis of the features of metaphor-based expressions in the corpus,the author tries to figure out how metaphors contribute to persuasion,convincing Americans to support Obamacare.The findings are as follows:1)at the linguistic level,metaphorical units recognized by metaphor identification procedure(MIP)are mainly distributed over metaphorically used nouns and metaphorically used verbs,for these two content words are capable of maximizing listeners' information input in limited time and space;2)from the cognitive perspective,President Obama draws on six source domains to strengthen listeners' such a frame "the existing health care system is bad while the one after reforming is good",and the six source domains that are familiar to people in this corpus are "economy,reification,personification,journey,war and game";3)taking rhetoric's“ethos,logos and pathos" as the evaluation criteria,President Obama's metaphors are effective in persuasion,and all those conceptual metaphors constructed by Obama's metaphorical language in fact serve for the above three criteria,but each of them has their specific focuses.This paper is not only an analysis of the linguistic metaphors in the surface,but also an investigation of conceptual metaphors,frames,as well as how metaphors contribute to persuasion in the deep sense,which might provide inspiration and enlightenment for the future studies that aim to explore the deep implication of persuasion-oriented speeches.