Source domains in conceptualizations of the state in Chinese and Hungarian political discourse

Abstract

In the view of cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are often understood through more concrete domains of experience, and the resulting conceptual metaphors deeply influence the way people think of and reason about them. Over the past few decades, several interesting studies have been published about this feature in the realm of politics, where the power of speech is greatly felt. One of the most basic concepts of this realm is that of the state, sometimes equated with the country people live in. This paper discusses similarities and differences in the conceptualization of the state in Chinese political discourse on one hand, and Hungarian political discourse on the other, as they are reflected in the source domains used as vehicles of understanding. The discussion is based on corpus research findings, but the analysis relies both on individual intuition of the authors, members of these two cultures (yielding quality analysis), and on frequency counts in the texts of the corpora (quantity analysis). The functions of culture in shaping metaphors and choosing a specific source domain are also taken into consideration in this contrastive study of the two languages.

The concept of Family in Mandarin Chinese – A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to the Comprehension of Chinese Jia

“…Besides, the employment of the LEADER AS A FATHER and FOREIGN COUNTRY AS A PARENT SUBSTITUTE/A CLOSE RELATIVE metaphors may also indicate the parental responsibilities of Taiwan leaders and criticize the malicious intervention of the United States of America and Japan in the political issues related to Taiwan. Moreover, the research of Kou and Farkas (2014) has not only confirmed the use of the conventional COUNTRY/STATE/NATION AS FAMILY metaphor in the annual work reports of China's central government from the year 2004 to 2012 but also observed elements of Lakoff's two family/moral models from those actions the Chinese state can perform as both a supportive nurturer of its people and a controlling implementer of political policies. Contrary to Lakoff's (1996) intuitive assumption about the dominance of the Strict Father model in Chinese politics, no conspicuous dominance of either model has been indicated clearly in the nine years of government's work reports, and there is a tendency of favoring political expressions that are usually associated with the Nurturant Parent model of morality to mobilize the joint efforts of the masses for realizing the political goals of social stability and national prosperity.…”

“…Scholars have discovered that the Chinese language has numerous conventional expressions with underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies, and a great deal of metaphorical domains are shared by Chinese and English speakers to make sense of the abstract concepts such as LOVE, HAPPINESS, ANGER, TIME and so on (Yu 1995(Yu , 2003a(Yu , 2003b(Yu , 2009b(Yu , 2012Zhao 2000;Sun 2006;Zhai 2008;Kövecses 2005Kövecses , 2006Kövecses , 2010a. Besides, complex concepts like SOCIETY, NATION, STATE, COMPANY, ORGANIZATIONS are largely understood through metaphors and metonymies (Lakoff 1996;Musolff 2004;Kövecses 2005Kövecses , 2006Kövecses , 2010aKou and Farkas 2014), and FAMILY as a complex, socio-cultural concept is also interpreted figuratively in the Chinese language (Feng 2011;Zhou 2011;Ye 2012). However, a comprehensive, corpus-based study about FAMILY in Chinese is still missing, so the present research is conducted with authentic linguistic data from a national, authorized Chinese language corpus to present a comparatively comprehensive investigation of FAMILY, and the research also aims to discover possible changes in the Chinese people's conception of FAMILY due to the dramatic social reforms in modern China.…”

“…Lauenstein's (2013) research has further demonstrated the frequent use of FAMILY metaphors as a means of mobilization in European politics, with a confirmation that FAMILY metaphors may contribute little to national identification but elicit negative associations with Nazism or nationalism. Farkas has also denied the prevalence of the COUNTRY/STATE/NATION AS FAMILY metaphor in Hungarian political discourse, and she believes that the BIG BROTHER metaphor in the Communist era only appears occasionally in jokes nowadays, which has a negative implication about the weakness of Hungary's national power (Kou and Farkas 2014). On the other hand, both Chinese and western scholars have verified the salient preference of FAMILY metaphors in China and the positive functions of FAMILY metaphors in enhancing national identification and emotional attachment in Chinese political discourse (see Duara 1996;Liu 2002;Li 2006;Cheng 2009;Link 2013;McCormack and Blair 2015;Steinmüller 2015).…”

“…Therefore, all metaphors with 家(jiā) as source domain are carefully analyzed with corpus linguistic examples, and both word-by-word and normal English translation are provided for the clarity of explanation. Furthermore, it is observed that FAMILY as a familiar source domain is frequently used in metaphorical conceptualizations of political concepts in Chinese, and many scholarly studies have verified the wide application of the COUNTRY/STATE/NATION AS FAMILY metaphor with discussions about Lakoff's (1996) two family models of morality in American, European, Russian and Chinese political reasoning and political conceptions (see Lakoff 1996;Liu 2002;Musolff 2004;Cienki 2005aCienki , 2005bLi 2006;Cheng 2009;A'Beckett 2012;Kou and Farkas 2014;Steinmüller 2015). Inspired by research discoveries from the Modern Chinese Corpus and based on the author's earlier joint research with Farkas in 2014, a comparative, corpus-based study of the COUNTRY/STATE/NATION AS FAMILY metaphor is also included in this chapter to investigate and compare the adoption of Lakoff's (1996) two family models, the salience of the COUNTRY/STATE/NATION AS FAMILY metaphor and its function in Chinese, American and Hungarian political discourse, with the importance of culture as a contextual factor taken into consideration in discussion and analysis.…”

“…Having close to 54 thousand words, the American political discourse corpus includes State of the Union Addresses from the year 2004 to 2012 13 which were delivered by both the Republican president Bush and the Democratic president Obama and can be considered as annual government work reports with a summary of the previous year and the tasks for the next year. The Hungarian corpus contains around 710 thousand characters and covers annual summary speeches given by prime ministers at the beginning of each February from the year 1999 to 2010 14 , in which the government's achievements, future goals and important current issues were mentioned (Kou and Farkas 2014).…”