论文范文：探析隐喻在经济视角下美国领导人就职演说中的表现
1. Introduction
Politics involves reconciling differences through discussion and persuasion.Communication is therefore central to politics (quoted in Paul Chilton 2004: 71). This quotation tells us not only the nature of politics, but also the dependency relationship between politics and language. Politics is indispensable to our social life and, more important, affects almost all spheres of our lives. From the perspective of linguistics, politics is the use of language, because politicians rely on language to stage propaganda and to evoke the public's agreement so as to achieve their purposes. However, political discourses sometimes concern some specific fields which are unavoidably obscure to the public, after all many of them are ordinary people. Thus, in order to make expressions exoteric and understandable becomes politicians' necessary skills, they tend to make use of ordinary expressions which are familiar to people from all walks of life to explain complex concepts and reveal their visions. When politicians deliver speeches, in order to explicate the obscure terms and jargons in a relatively common way, they have to employ a lot of metaphors. On the other hand, the President and his policies and plans are calculated to appeal to the voters, and we agree to Semino that metaphor plays an important role in persuading in politics (Semino 2008: 36), whichtherefore, results in the prevalence of metaphors in political discourses. It is for those reasons that linguistics studies on political discourses have never ceased, and will attract more attention.
1.1 Research background
For the past decades of years, many scholars and researchers have had great interests in Lakoff and Johnsen's conceptual metaphor theory which views from a cognitive angle. Many of those researches focus on theoretical field to study the definitions, classifications, mapping mechanisms and history of conceptual metaphors. Besides, a lot of scholars study the identifications, features, processes of understanding, functions, and realization bases of conceptual metaphors through the analyses of words, expressions, idioms, and different sorts of discourses. Lakoff has illustrated the mapping mechanism of some common metaphors and demonstrated us good examples
2. Literature Review
This part first reviews the general development of metaphor theories. Then, it concentrates on related studies on the conceptual metaphor theory. Next, it goes further to review related works on conceptual metaphor in political discourses.
2.1 General review of metaphor theories
The study of metaphor has long been an important subject to domestic and international researchers and scholars. Generally speaking, the development of metaphor theory can be roughly divided into three stages: lexical studies from rhetorical perspective, semantic studies shifting to cognitive perspective, and multidisciplinary studies from cognitive perspective. In this paper we review four main theories of metaphor research, which attach different degrees of importance to metaphor. They are comparison theory, substitution theory, interaction theory, and conceptual metaphor theory. Aristotle's comparison theory and Quintilian's substitution theory carried out at the lexical level from rhetorical perspective are at the first stage, Richards' interaction theory is the transition from lexical to semantic and also from rhetorical to cognitive, and Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory based on cognitive linguistics belongs to the third stage.
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK……………………13
3.1 Conceptual metaphor theory…………………… 13
3.2 Theoretical improvements of conceptual metaphor theory ……………………15
3.2.1 The emergence of similarity in the mapping process ……………………16
3.2.2 Standard of classification of conceptual metaphors ……………………17
3.2.3 Proces of Mapping……………………19
This paper clarifies the overlap of the classification of conceptual metaphors and modifies the mapping procedures so as to make the theory more scientific, and probe the effect that the economic conditions work on the choices of conceptual metaphor in America Presidential Inaugural Addresses based on those standard and mapping procedures. The clarification and analysis results are our contributions to the theoretical and practical studies on conceptual metaphor, which may also offer certain help in understanding the real intentions in American political speeches. What's more, given that the effects of social conditions and personal reasons are often ignored in the studies of conceptual metaphor, we pay attention to the effects of economic conditions in hope of further studies on other conditions or more in depth researches on the same topic.Because of limitations on knowledge and the lack of space, there are some drawbacks in this study. Firstly, the data is not enough, State of Union Address is a better option if having enough time and space. Secondly, we didn't exclude individual differences. Thirdly, since the complete understanding of the conceptual metaphor theory demands extensive reading and profound knowledge of many subjects, we feel unable to master all the corresponding knowledge and use it in this research. Fourthly, the identification of conceptual metaphors and the argumentations may be subjective, and need farther verification.