A Study On The Conceptual Metaphors In 2016 American Presidential Debates

The presidential debate in the United States has played a crucial role in the general election and has exerted great influence on the final result of the election.As a unique and important form of western political discourse,it has drawn widespread attention in the academic field.In recent years,rhetoric,pragmatic and discourse analysis has mainly been conducted on the United States presidential debate.However,research on its conceptual metaphors is rare.Accordingly,this thesis studies the conceptual metaphors in the 2016 presidential debate,trying to provide a new angle on this political discourse.The three debates between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump are downloaded from the official website “American Presidential Project”(http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/),which totals 54827 words.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),this thesis identifies and classifies the conceptual metaphors in the three debates,and the number of conceptual metaphors as well as the frequency of various types of metaphors are calculated in the research corpus,which provides digital support for the study of conceptual metaphors.This study answers three research questions: 1.What are major conceptual metaphors used by the two candidates in the 2016 America presidential debates? 2.What conceptual metaphors are unique to Hillary and Trump respectively? 3.What role did the conceptual metaphors play in the presidential debates?It has been found that the two candidates used 22 categories of 880 conceptual metaphors in the 2016 United States presidential debate.The metaphors whose frequency is greater than 10% is taken as major ones,and they are Journey Metaphors,Human Metaphors,War Metaphors,Machine Metaphors,and Family Metaphors.At the same time,it is also found that unique Light Metaphors are only used by Donald Trump while Illness Metaphors are uniquely used by Hillary Clinton in the debate.These conceptual metaphors help reveal the ideologies,governing philosophies,political goals,different values and social experiences of the presidential candidates.They not only help the public better understand the complex and abstract political information in the debate,but also help the presidential candidate receive more support.The functions of conceptual metaphors used in the debate can be summarized as: highlighting function,simplification function,persuasion function and motivation function.This study not only helps to increase ordinary people's awareness of conceptual metaphors in political discourse,but also provides readers with new perceptions of American political culture and important leaders.At the same time,the present research provides a new linguistic perspective on the study of American presidential debates,and has some implications for future analysis of the conceptual metaphors in other political texts.