A Study Of Metaphor In Xijinping The Governance Of China ? From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

With the increasing national strength of China and the continuous improvement of its international status,China's contemporary political discourse has received widespread attention around the world,and it is also closely related to President Xi Jinping's change in the expression style of official Chinese political discourse.XiJinping The Governance of China ? focuses on the world's future development path,the ideological concept of China's development direction and the way of development.It authoritatively and objectively sums up a series of speeches by President Xi Jinping and is highly concerned by both at home and abroad.It is a crucial way for the international community to understand China.Consequently,it is of great significance to study the English version of Xi Jinping The Governance of China ? as an analytical text.In the academic field,the research is mainly analyzed from the perspective of translation theory,researches on conceptual metaphors employed conceptual integration mechanism is comparatively rare and little has done on Xi Jinping The Governance of China ?.From the perspective of conceptual integration theory,this thesis analyzes the metaphors in Xi Jinping The Governance of China ?,effectively promotes political and cultural exchanges between different countries,and allows the world to listen to China and understand China.It will play a positive role in shaping our country's good international image.What's more,it helps the listener to grasp the external and incomprehensible concept of society by virtue of the familiar concepts or things in life,and at the same time provides a new perspective for the study of political discourse.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is an overall introduction,which principally makes a summary of the research background,aim and significance,research methodology,research hypotheses and the framework of this thesis.The second chapter reviews domestic and foreign studies on political discourse and domestic scholars' studies on XiJinping The Governance of China ?.The third chapter provides the theoretical framework which presents the definition of metaphor,the types of metaphor as well as the network model of conceptual integration theory.The fourth chapter constitutes the core chapter of this thesis which analyzes the metaphors in Xi Jinping The Governance of China ? from three aspects: structural metaphor,ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor,researches the process of conceptual integration mechanism so as to interpret them and makes an analysis of how Party Secretary Xi Jinping used metaphor to construct the ideological system of socialism with Chinese characteristics.Last but not least,the fifth chapter is the conclusion of this thesis,in which the findings and limitations of this research as well as suggestions for future research are put forward.By combining conceptual integration theory with political discourse for analysis and research,the author has the following findings:Firstly,this thesis divides the conceptual metaphor in the book into three categories based on the classification of Lakoff and Johnson: structural metaphor,ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor.Structural metaphor includes journey metaphor,building metaphor,war metaphor,disease metaphor and family metaphor.Ontological metaphor embraces anthropomorphous metaphor,plant metaphor,water metaphor,animal metaphor and metal metaphor.Orientational metaphor contains up/down metaphor,front/back metaphor and central/periphery metaphor.Metaphor has a strong explanatory power on political discourse.It plays a positive role in the interpretation of political discourse by the public.From a linguistic point of view,expressing abstract political ideas in concrete and vivid language can make it easier for us to understand political discourse and reduce the resistance of the audience to some extent.Secondly,conceptual integration takes the psychological space as the basic unit and realizes the construction of dynamic real-time meaning through the conceptual integration network.It is a kind of cognitive activities that combine frameworks from different cognitive domains.It is also an extremely common cognitive process in people's thinking and activities.In the conceptual integration network,the dynamic operation mechanism of the meaning construction process is revealed through the cross-space mapping,selective projection and a series of operations in the synthesis space.Thirdly,this thesis adopts a unique research perspective to put political discourse into the conceptual integration theory,which makes up for the inadequacy of predecessors' analysis from conceptual metaphor.It provides a new train of thought to interpret the text from the perspective of conceptual integration theory as the research of metaphor in the text,combining theoretical framework with the text analysis,using powerful explanatory power of conceptual integration theory to the analysis of metaphor in political discourse.The author found that the conceptual integration theory is of great help to understand the metaphor in political discourse,but also can further detailed analysis of metaphor generation process and better understand the socialist ideology with Chinese characteristics.This thesis expounds the working mechanism of metaphor in political discourse by means of the conceptual integration theory,which is helpful for large people to better interpret political discourse,deepen people's understanding of political discourse,and enrich the connotation of conceptual integration theory.At the same time,the perspective of conceptual integration enriches the cognitive research of political discourse metaphor.At present,there are few studies on the meaning construction course of political discourse from the angle of conceptual integration theory.It is hoped that this thesis can provide some help for people to deeply understand the metaphorical phenomena in political discourse and promote the research on conceptual metaphor in political discourse in the future.