Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And American Leaders' Speeches At Universities From The Perspective Of Critical Metaphor Analysis

Metaphor is purely regarded as a kind of rhetorical device in the initial research,which under the influence of Lakoff and Johnson,is gradually shifted towards the field of cognition.Based on the previous researches,Jonathan Charteris-Black puts forward the theory of Critical Metaphor Analysis,which studies metaphors in discourses by combining critical discourse analysis,cognitive linguistics,corpus linguistics and pragmatics,through which underlying belief,attitude and emotion of the discourse group can be revealed.Ever since the birth of the theory of Critical Metaphor Analysis,more and more scholars have been applying it into the study of political discourses.However,quite a few of them fail to strictly follow the analytical stages of Critical Metaphor Analysis,let alone a comparative and contrastive study of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American political speeches at universities.This thesis attempts to analyze speeches addressed to college students by Chinese political leaders Xi Jinping,Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin and American political leaders Obama,Bush and Clinton,hoping to figure out characteristics of conceptual metaphors from the perspective of Critical Metaphor Analysis,followed up by the further exploration of the factors that result in the same and different uses of conceptual metaphors between the two corpora.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in this paper with Conceptual Metaphor Theory as the basic theoretical guideline.The analysis of the two corpora shows that metaphors adopted by Chinese political leaders in their speeches made at universities are journey metaphor,war metaphor,building metaphor,organism metaphor,family metaphor,circle metaphor,river metaphor,tie metaphor,art metaphor and chess metaphor while metaphors adopted by American political leaders in their speeches made at universities consist of journey metaphor,organism metaphor,war metaphor,building metaphor,religion metaphor,family metaphor,tie metaphor,river metaphor,physical environment metaphor and circle metaphor.When comparing and contrasting conceptual metaphors used in the two corpora,it can be found that there are both the same conceptual metaphors from metaphor categories such as family metaphor,river metaphor,building metaphor and organism metaphor,and the different conceptual metaphors from metaphor categories including journey metaphor,war metaphor,circle metaphor,tie metaphor,building metaphor and organism metaphor.The analysis also shows that art metaphor and chess metaphor are unique in the Chinese corpus while religion metaphor and physical environment metaphor are solely employed in the English corpus.Additionally,it can be found that the same and different uses of conceptual metaphors between the corpora are affected by three factors — ideology,history and culture.This study contributes to both comparative and contrastive researches of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English political discourses and further promotes a more particular knowledge of Chinese and American cultures,thus shedding new light on cross-cultural communication,foreign language translation and foreign language learning and teaching.