A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Diplomatic Speeches Of President Xi And President Obama

Metaphor research can be traced back to Aristotle in ancient Greece,during which period,the metaphor was only regarded as a rhetoric device and an art of language.Until the 1980 s,Lakoff and Johnson proposed the conceptual metaphor theory,believing that metaphor is a universal way of thinking and cognition.In recent years,more and more attention has been paid to metaphor study in political speeches,such as inaugural speeches,campaign speeches,New Year's greeting speeches and other topic speeches,but studies on a contrastive study of conceptual metaphors in diplomatic speeches are relatively few.Diplomatic speech,a special form of political speech,is an intuitive demonstration of national political ideas and national images,which plays a crucial role in international political affairs.Because of the abstractness and complexity of international politics,in political speeches,politicians can better achieve the publicity effect and political purposes through conceptual metaphors.Therefore,this thesis aims to reveal how President Xi and President Obama can interpret their political philosophy and construct national images of each country through conceptual metaphors in diplomatic political speeches.In this study,20 speeches made by President Xi Jinping(2012-2017)and President Barack Obama(2009-2016)are selected as the objectives,which constitute the self-built databases,with 42259 words in the Chinese database and 35328 words in the English database.This thesis,based on the theoretical foundation of conceptual metaphor theory and the methodological framework of critical metaphor analysis,conducts a contrastive analysis of diplomatic speeches delivered by Xi Jinping and Barack Obama with quantitative and qualitative methods from metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation.It aims to find out the distribution of metaphor use,to interpret the similarities and differences of metaphor use and to explain the factors influencing the metaphor choices.The results are as follows: conceptual metaphors are pervasive in diplomatic speeches of President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama.Firstly,through metaphor identification,it can be seen that six dominant conceptual metaphors of journey metaphor,war metaphor,building metaphor,human metaphor,family metaphor and plant metaphor are the main linguistic forms in diplomatic speeches of President Xi and President Obama.Among these dominant conceptual metaphors,the top three types of metaphor use in Chinese data are journey metaphor(32%),building metaphor(17%)and human metaphor(11%),while the top three types in English data are war metaphor(41%),journey metaphor(24%)and building metaphor(9%).Besides,the total amount of the use of conceptual metaphors in two data is close to each other,but as for the overall trend,the use of each type of conceptual metaphors in Chinese data is higher than that in English data.Only for war metaphor and religion metaphor,metaphor use in English data is higher than that in Chinese data.Secondly,through metaphor interpretation,it can be found that similarities and differences exist in the metaphor use of two databases.By the Chi-square test in SPSS,there exists a significant difference in the frequency of metaphor us in two data;based on the similarities and differences in the content of conceptual representations,it is concluded that building metaphor,human metaphor and plant metaphor are identical metaphors,journey metaphor,war metaphor and family metaphor are similar metaphors,and unique metaphors involve religious metaphors and circle metaphors.Through the contrastive analysis,we find that conceptual metaphor plays a great role in the interpretation of political philosophy and the construction of national image.In diplomatic speeches by two leaders,President Xi and President Obama are good at using a large number of metaphors to convey their political ideas,and tend to map specific concepts that people are familiar with onto strange abstract political concepts,in order to achieve their political purposes of persuading,infecting and inspiring the audience and achieving the effect of publicity.Meanwhile,different national images of two countries are also established by the metaphor use in diplomatic speeches of President Xi and President Obama.Thirdly,through metaphor explanation,it can be concluded that the factors influencing the use of conceptual metaphors in diplomatic speeches involve individual resources and social resources.The similarities of metaphor use come from similar physical experiences and cognitive activities in the individual resources,and the differences of metaphor use are caused by the social resources,such aspects as ideology,history and culture.This thesis can help the readers to better understand political discourse and to deepen the comprehension of political ideologies and social cultures of different countries.In addition,this study can enrich the research dimension of political discourse and also provide new ideas for the future study of political discourse.