A Study Of Conceptual Metaphors And Discourse Space Construction In Political Speeches Of Leaders Of China And The USA

Metaphor is frequently employed in political discourse to embody specific ideological attachments and implicitly influence the audience’ s understanding,so as to realize discourse goals.Conceptual metaphor in political discourse has always been a hotspot in discourse studies,and Proximization Theory offers a perspective to analyze metaphor’s role in discourse space construction.However,related studies from this perspective have seldom conducted a systematic quantitative analysis of metaphor,and the role of corpus has often been merely searching items.Therefore,the present study bridged this gap by employing a corpus-based approach to conduct a quantitative analysis of metaphor and based on the quantitative analysis,further investigation into the metaphor use in discourse,so as to reduce the impact of manual work and subjectivity.The study adopted the Spatial-Temporal-Axiological model of Proximization Theory to investigate metaphors in political discourse.Based on the self-built sematic-annotated corpora of China’s and the USA’s political discourse comprised of respective country’s statements in English at the UNGA General Debate from 2009 to 2018,the study retrieved the lexical items related to space,time,and axiology via corpus tools,and identified metaphors therefrom.The metaphor data were sorted out by nation,and by space,time,and axiology,and analyzed for discussion on metaphor patterns,meaning construction and discourse space construction.The study has the following major findings.First,generally,in terms of source domain and frequency,the difference in metaphor employment was relatively small between countries,but great between the three proximization frameworks.Second,metaphors construe abstract target domains as concrete source domains easier to locate in discourse space,construct the proximity of the others which will cause a threat to the self,and thus legitimize the self’s corresponding policies and actions as prevention.Third,the metaphors identified under different proximization frameworks reflect inherently consistent discourse strategies.Fourth,both countries adopted more positive self-presentation than negative other-presentation,and more future-to-present shifts than past-to-present shifts,but the USA’s negative other-presentation and past-to-present shifts were much greater than China’s.The study integrated and optimized the methodologies of Proximization Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis,analyzed,explained,and compared the conceptual metaphors in China’s and the USA’s political discourse,and contributed to discourse studies on metaphor.