| Political speech is an important form of public discourse,and plays a significant role in politics.The existing research on political speeches is conducted mainly from perspectives of rhetoric,pragmatics,and critical discourse analysis.In recent years,the cognitive perspective becomes popular.Scholars represented by Lakoff(2002)study political discourse based on conceptual metaphor theory,and find that politicians frequently employ conceptual metaphors to serve their political purposes.This thesis identifies,summarizes,analyzes,and explains the metaphors in President Trump's speeches based on conceptual metaphor theory and metaphor identification procedure.The data set includes 40 President Trump's weekly addresses in 2017.Through weekly addresses,American Presidents express their opinions and comments on current affairs at home and abroad.This thesis aims at analyzing and explaining the metaphors in President Trump's speeches,the relation among these metaphors,and how Trump systematically employs them to achieve his political goals.Study finds that the target domain America can be mapped onto nine source domains,including race,game,journey,building,machine,human,family,war,and disaster/burden/illness.Moreover,these nine categories of metaphors are coherent and are all about America's development,including aspects like economy,medical care,job employment,and immigration.Race and game metaphor convey America's development in the international stage;journey,building,human,family and war metaphor emphasize America's development at home;war and disaster/burden/illness metaphor strengthen America's development under President Trump's leadership.The family metaphor in President Trump's speeches is more sophisticated than Lakoff's proposal of "strict father" and "nurturant parent" model.In president Trump's speeches,America is home and the nation is a family,but the role of President Trump and the government in the American family is not the "strict father" or "nurturant parent" as Lakoff has proposed.President Trump employs these metaphors for two purposes.One is using these metaphors to convey that the process of America's future development is challenging and encouraging American people to unite as one family to build a stronger America.The other is to create an image of American saver and hero,and convince audience of-the correctness of his political policies by comparing America's current situation left by American former government and the development of America under his leadership.In this way,President Trump wins audience's support and favor. |
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