A Contrastive Study Of Cultural Metaphors In U.S.-China High-level Consultation On People-to-People Exchange

From traditional views of metaphor to cognitive views and then to present critical metaphor analysis,there exists ?cognitive shift? and ?social shift? of the research on metaphor.With a cultural turn in discourse analysis,metaphor,as a result,is on its way of ?cultural shift?.Taking cultural metaphor analysis and dialogic space construction as its framework,the thesis adopts corpus-linguistics and comparative method to analyze seven rounds of U.S.-China High-Level Consultation on People-to-People Exchange delivered by leaders of two countries with the assistance of online corpus tool Wmatrix.Contrastive analysis of the distribution of cultural metaphor in American and Chinese corpora is conducted;degree of cultural exchange as well as underlying cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity are explored.The findings can be stated as follows:Firstly,the distribution of cultural metaphor in both corpora shares a similar pattern in spite of some minute differences.The dominant components are technology metaphor and entertainment metaphor.The relatively insignificant component is social metaphor.In comparison,the percentage of economy metaphor in American corpus is higher than that in Chinese corpus while the proportion of literature metaphor in Chinese corpus surpasses that in American corpus.Secondly,in register of entertainment and technology,the overlapping parts are prominent,which indicates that dialogues in these areas are much likely to resonate.They form the foundation of dialogue between America and China.In register of literature,economy and social,the dialogic space is significantly smaller.It demonstrates the great potential for further dialogue.As for types,Chinese spokesmen take advantage of lots of various metaphorical expressions in literary register.In terms of economy register,American spokesmen utilize much more diverse metaphors.As for frequency,in terms of technology metaphor,China uses it more frequently than America does on the whole,especially in the fields of H(architecture,housing and home)and O(substances,materials,objects and equipment).America surpasses China in the field of N(number and measurement).In the register of entertainment,it‘s worth noting that both China and America continually exploit metaphorical expressions of M(movement,location,travel and transport).Thirdly,the degree of cultural exchange demonstrates certain cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity.a)The massive employment of technology metaphor and entertainment metaphor by both America and China reflects cultural homogeneity in material culture and middle-level culture.b)The linguistic expressions of a potentially universal conceptual metaphor are not necessarily identical in different languages and people from two countries might have different understanding of the same metaphorical expression.c)The cultural heterogeneity is mainly embodied in deep culture and bottom culture.China lays emphasis on literature metaphor,reflecting its values of oneness of man and nature as well as being people-oriented.The proportion of American game metaphor and business metaphor is larger,which highlights its culture of masculinity,long-term orientation and being pragmatic.