A Study of Conceptual Metaphor in President Xi Jinping’s speech

In December 2019, the COVID-19 was discovered in Wuhan, China. China adopted effective strategies and measures and launched a nationwide fight against the epidemic. Until September 6, 2020, China has won an initial decisive victory in the fight against the epidemic. To this end, Chinese president Xi Jinping delivered a speech to commend role models in the fight against COVID-19. This paper attempts to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of various metaphors in president Xi Jinping’s speech in order to fully reveal the ideology contained in the metaphors. This study first uses Pragglejaz (2007)’s Metaphor Identification Procedure to identify the metaphors in Xi Jinping’s speech, followed by the classification of metaphors under the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. There are 17 metaphorical types, such as war metaphor, architectural metaphor, and container metaphor and so on. The frequency and resonance values of metaphorical keywords are calculated by AntConc 3.5.7. Critical Discourse Analysis serves as a theoretical tool to qualitatively explain the ideological connotation of the speech. The metaphors in the speech express the ideology which help China fighting against COVID-19, including: the political belief of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the national emotion of patriotism, and the cultural tradition of collectivism