An Analysis On Metaphors In Trump’s Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Critical Metaphor

Metaphor has been the focus of attention for linguists,and it dates back to Aristotle times of two thousand years ago.In the past,linguists regarded metaphor as a means of rhetoric to make language more vivid in literary works,but ignored metaphor’s pragmatic function to recognize the outside world.The book Metaphors We Live by published by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 marks that metaphor breaks out traditional restriction and enters a new era.Recently,conceptual metaphor theory is widely employed in analyzing the metaphor use in English political discourses.Conceptual metaphor theory states that metaphor is a cross-domain mapping in thought,usually from a familiar,concrete source domain to an unfamiliar abstract target domain.However,it cannot satisfy the need to explain the underlying motivation in political discourse from the cognitive perspective together with the studies at home start late and are not sufficient.Thus,this thesis adopts Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis as a framework to identify,interpret and explain Trump’s metaphorical language in his inaugural addresses,combing with the metaphor construction processes in conceptual metaphor theory to discuss these two questions:(1)What types of metaphors are used in Trump’s inaugural addresses?(2)How metaphor is mapped systematically to convey hidden intention in Trump’s inaugural address from the perspective of critical metaphor analysis?This thesis applies Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis to identify the metaphors used in Trump’s address firstly.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to determine the metaphorical keywords and classify the metaphor types.Secondly,combined with the specific social context to describe,analyze the metaphors.Lastly,by analyzing the statistical results and revealing the political ideology.With the help of conceptual metaphor theory and critical metaphor analysis,this thesis aims at analyzing the use of metaphors.On the one hand,this thesis discusses how the metaphor in political discourse conveys Trump ’s values and realizes his political intentions;on the other hand,it helps us get a systematic understanding of pragmatic function of metaphors.Besides,it helps the audience have a clear idea of the intention that speaker use to convey his political ideas,thus improving our critical readability for political discourses.