Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 383A R T I C L E
Discourse & Society
Copyright © 2008
SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 19(3): 383–408
10.1177/0957926508088966
Ideological influence on BUILDING
metaphors in Taiwanese presidential
speeches
LOUIS WEI-LUN LU AND KATHLEEN AHRENS
NATIO NAL TAI WAN U N IVERSITY, TAIWAN
A B ST R A C T This article studies the conceptual metaphor A COUNTRY
IS A BUILDING in Taiwanese presidential speeches. Two culture-specific
metaphor patterns are identified as being unusually productive in the corpora:
retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors.
These clusters of BUILDING metaphors deviate from the BUILDING metaphors
reported in previous literature at two levels. At the conceptual level,
retrospective BUILDING metaphors include FORERUNNERS ARE BUILDERS
and PAST HISTORY IS FOUNDATION, and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors
involve COMMUNISTS ARE DESTROYERS and THE COMMUNIST TAKEOVER
IS DESTRUCTION. At the ideological level, history puts such metaphor uses
into perspective as rhetorical strategies employed by Kuomintang presidents
to instill a Chinese ideology. The Democratic Progressive Party president, by
contrast, tries to replace such metaphors with alternatives, which results
in his overall low number of BUILDING metaphors. These different framing
strategies reflect the manipulation of metaphors to appropriate ideological
issues to each presidents’ respective political advantage.
KEY WO RDS: CDA, conceptual metaphor, frame, ideology, political discourse,
presidential speeches, social context, Taiwan
1. Introduction
Ideology and its manifestations in discourse have been a productive area of
study in the research paradigm of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough,
1995; Van Dijk, 1991, 1993). Its interaction with conceptual metaphors is also
of paramount importance in political language analysis. Lakoff (1996, 2004),
for example, studies how the Democrats and the Republicans frame their
debates, and how language use in both political parties reflects underlying
cognitive models and political attitudes. Fairclough’s (2000) study on New
Labour language, which regards metaphor as one among a number of linguistic
strategies used to conceal power relations, identifies metaphors for technology
384 Discourse & Society 19(3)
and change as having to do with natural migration and tidal waves respectively.
Zinken (2003) focuses on the intertwining nature of cultural experience and
conceptual metaphors by discussing how, in Poland, newspapers of different
ideologies use correspondingly different metaphors. Musolff (2006) studies
British and German public debates about the European Union and investigates
the relation between metaphor scenarios and political attitudes, arguing that
political dispositions are marked by specific scenarios that provide focal points for
understanding the target concept. Cheng (2006: 599) explores Chen Shui-bian’s
use of the imagery of ‘victimhood’ as a rhetorical strategy ‘to evoke the unity
of the same ethnic group’ by portraying the Taiwanese people as victims in his
inaugural speeches. Flowerdew and Leong (2007) also discuss how metaphors
vary according to the opposing political stances, using Hong Kong’s two Chinese
newspapers as data. In spite of their valuable contributions, each of these studies
nevertheless has its share of limitations. For example, Lakoff emphasizes the
idealized cognitive models in American politics, but gives little linguistic evidence.
Zinken, Fairclough, Cheng, and Flowerdew and Leong, however, provide ample
linguistic evidence in support of the sociocultural function of metaphor, but do
not explain in a systematic way of how metaphor works at the conceptual level
of source–target domain pairings. Musolff gives extensive examples and conceptual
pairings between domains, but as his study focuses on a synchronic
comparison between two countries, no frequency of metaphor tokens are given.
This article proposes that examining how metaphors work at the conceptual level
will allow for a better understanding of how metaphor patterns are ideologically
motivated in authentic political discourse data. We adopt a corpora-based
approach to diachronically compare and investigate the ideological factor by
focusing on the conceptual metaphor A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING in Taiwanese
presidential speeches.
2. Country overview and theoretical background
In this section, we briefly cover several key elements that play a prominent
role in this research: we first give an overview of some historical and political
background of the country under study. Following that, the notion of framing
and previous studies on BUILDING metaphors are reviewed.
2.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND THE POLITICAL STATUS QUO OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA1
The Republic of China (hereafter the ROC) is a political entity on the Pacific
Rim that was established in 1911. The country underwent a civil war from the
1930s until the 1970s. As a result of the war, the Communist party took over
major parts of the country’s original territory, now known as Mainland China,
and the Chinese Nationalist Party, or the Kuomintang (KMT), relocated the ROC
government toTaiwan.To date, some people still view the two political entities, i.e.
Mainland China andTaiwan, as two parties in civil war under one unified country,
whereas some others view them as separate countries because of their autonomous
sovereignties. Such polar perspectives exist not only in the world, but also within
Taiwan. According to the above distinction, within Taiwan there are now two
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 385
major conflicting political camps: the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP). The KMT promotes re-unification with Mainland China, while the DPP
supports Taiwan’s independence.2
Since the government relocation, the KMT
had had three presidents up to 2000: Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo, the
eldest son of Chiang Kai-shek, and Lee Teng-hui. By contrast, the DPP’s only
president, Chen-Shui-bian, has a term that extends from 2000 to 2008. The
ideology behind Chen and his party is different from that of the previous three
presidents.
2.2 FRAMING
A frame is a cognitive model based on recurring experiences. It organizes our
world knowledge and allows us to make appropriate inferences based on the
systematic knowledge.3
A frame also comprises many sub-frames that can
capture the information of more detailed situations of a frame (Minsky, 1975).
In the BUILDING frame, for example, there are BASE, GROUNDWORK, PHYSICAL
STRUCTURE, and many notional elements that are, more or less directly, related
to the concept of BUILDING according to our epistemic knowledge.
For the relation of frame and text production, Goatly (1997) mentions
the notion of framing in passing and attributes its effect on metaphor ‘at the
contextual level’. It is, however, not clear whether this idea of context refers to
the linguistic co-text, or the extra-linguistic context of the speech event. The
present study thus aims to characterize in a detailed manner how ideology, as
a type of social context, motivates the way in which power elites frame political
discourse via tacit metaphor use.4
Lakoff (2004) also regards framing as a fundamental
strategy in political language and describes reframing as a strategy of
repositioning oneself to one’s own advantage in political debates. Charteris-Black
(2004), without mentioning the word ‘frame’, discusses how ‘conflict metaphors’
are used in British party manifestos and points out that conflict metaphors are
used differently by the British Labour and Conservative parties due to their
different political stances. Although Charteris-Black’s study on British political
language provides convincing amounts of data, the conceptual-level mappings
remain implicit in his discussion. Musolff’s (2006) study, mainly qualitative in
nature, demonstrates how certain domain elements enjoy special attention,
using the term ‘scenario’ in reference to specific subdomain elements. This study,
basing its argument on frequency count, incorporates the idea of framing and
specifies not only how framing works at the conceptual level, i.e. in what way
framing influences metaphorical mappings, but also how such framing strategies
are actuated by extra-linguistic factors. It will be laid out in later discussions
how presidents of different ideologies manipulate or frame metaphors to
their own political advantage and how such framing is motivated by ideological
considerations.
2.3 PREVIOUSLY ON BUILDING METAPHORS
BUILDING is a productive source domain. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed
AN ARGUMENT IS A BUILDING, Chilton and Ilyin (1993) studied the transnational
political discourse on the ‘common European house’ in several European
386 Discourse & Society 19(3)
languages, and Goatly (1997) identified A SOCIETY IS A BUILDING. Compared
with the earlier studies with a limited scope of target domains, Charteris-Black’s
(2004) critical metaphor analysis addresses BUILDING metaphors in general. His
observations on BUILDING metaphors include: first, they are rather prevalent
and constitute ‘nearly a quarter of all metaphors’ in manifestos of both parties
in Britain.5
Second, BUILDING metaphors highlight ‘progress towards longterm
social goals’, carry a strong positive connotation, and call for patience and
cooperation from the electorate (Charteris-Black, 2004: 71).6
However, we argue
that such interpretation is socioculturally dependent on his use of British party
manifestos as data, where country construction is understood as something to
be carried out in the future. We further observe that a similar rationale holds
for his observation of BUILDING metaphors in American presidential inaugural
speeches, since BUILDING metaphors in this corpus are also used to establish
a president’s credentials as someone likeable who shares the same hopes and
dreams as the voter. The proposed conceptual metaphors in the US Inaugural
Corpus are: WORTHWHILE ACTIVITY IS BUILDING and SOCIETY IS BUILDING
(Charteris-Black, 2004).
We can generalize the conceptual pairings that are involved in BUILDING
metaphors in Charteris-Black’s British and American data as follows: A
COUNTRY IS A BUILDING and CITIZENS AND POLITICAL LEADERS ARE
BUILDERS, in that builders contribute great effort to setting up the building and
citizens and political leaders contribute great effort to country development.
It follows that DEVELOPMENT OF A COUNTRY IS BUILDING CONSTRUCTION
in that country development takes a long time and building construction also
takes a long time. Figure 1 illustrates the conceptual pairings of BUILDING
metaphors framed in such a future-oriented way. Given the conceptual mappings
involved in forward-looking BUILDING metaphors, the prospect of future country
construction and effort contribution from political figures naturally emerge as
an inferential consequence as is shown in Charteris-Black’s study. However, we
further point out that this mapping holds only for a subset of forward-looking
BUILDING metaphors in our corpus. We also identify a cluster of retrospective
BUILDING metaphors that do not follow this mapping because they are arranged
in a past-oriented manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the two subsets
of BUILDING metaphors are framed and are conceptually grounded in different
ways so that they communicate different meanings in the Taiwanese political
context.
Specifically, a close look at the Taiwanese presidential speeches reveals that
the pattern of BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches does
not completely correspond to Charteris-Black’s observations in the following
ways: the percentage of BUILDING metaphors are relatively lower, especially
for Chen Shui-bian, and a chunk of BUILDING metaphors is not employed to
call for people’s patience but instead to serve another purpose. In view of the
incongruity, this article aims to address the following issues: (a) At the linguistic
level, how do BUILDING metaphors behave differently in Taiwanese presidential
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 387
speeches from Charteris-Black’s findings? (b) At the conceptual level, what crossdomain
mappings and conceptual/cognitive operations are involved behind the
presidents’ metaphor use? In other words, are there any differences in underlying
cognitive models/frames that structure the patterns of mappings? (c) Beyond
the conceptual level, is such metaphor use motivated by ideological factors? By
answering these questions, we hope to paint a more comprehensive picture of
how metaphor use and its underlying patterns of conceptual mapping interact
with ideological factors.
3. Methodology
With these research questions in mind, we limit the focus to a very specific
metaphor: A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING.7
The corpora are based on the speeches
given by the four ROC presidents on NewYear’s days and Double Tenth days since
1954 to 2006.8
Table 1 summarizes the composition of our data.9
For metaphor identification and extraction, novel and conventional metaphors
are both included in this study, with domain incongruity as the major criterion
for selection. The steps through which metaphors are identified and extracted
Source Domain: Target Domain:
BUILDING COUNTRY
BUILDING COUNTRY
BUILDERS CITIZENS &
POLITICAL
LEADERS
BUILDING
CONSTRUCTION DEVELOPMENT
F I G U R E 1. Possible conceptual pairings of forward-looking BUILDING metaphors.
TA B L E 1. Details of the Taiwan presidential corpus
Speeches Characters
Characters per
speech
Chiang K. (1954–75) 41 129,661 3,162
Chiang C. (1978–88)a
20 20,164 1,008
Lee (1989–2000) 22 41,851 1,902
Chen (2000–06) 12 44,081 3,673
a
After the passing of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, the vice president, Mr Yen Chia-kan, was
sworn in as the acting president until 1978, after which he recommended Chiang Chingkuo,
the eldest son of Chiang Kai-shek, to be the presidential candidate. Due to the pure
transitional nature between the authoritative leaders, we do not include Yen’s speeches
into the scope of our study.
388 Discourse & Society 19(3)
are: first, possible tokens of metaphors were manually sorted based on native
speaker intuition.10
Second, these possible candidates were searched in the Sinica
Corpus11
to see whether the lexemes occurred in the source domain of BUILDING
to ensure the metaphoricity of the tokens addressed. Consider Example 1 as an
illustration:
Example 1
完成 建設 復興 基地 和 重光
wancheng jianshe fuxing jidi han chongguang
complete construct comeback base and re-glorify
大陸 的 雙重 神聖 使命
dalu de shuangchong shensheng shiming
China DE double holy mission
(We will) complete the sacred mission both of constructing the base for our comeback
and of glorifying China. (Chiang C. 72)
The underlined lexeme jianshe ‘to construct’ was first intuitively identified as a
candidate of the BUILDING metaphor, so we went into the Sinica Corpus and
found that the lexeme appeared frequently with lexemes closely related to the
concept of BUILDING, such as gongdi ‘construction site’, gongcheng ‘architectural
work’, etc.
Hence based on a methodology aided by a general corpus, we can clearly
justify the metaphoricity of tokens identified and exclude suspect ones.12
4. Findings
First, we present an overall percentage difference between the British and the
Taiwanese corpora and postulate a possible cause for the difference. In addition,
two specific metaphor patterns have been identified to be productive in theTaiwan
Presidential Corpus: retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION
metaphors. In addition, we also enumerate alternatives to BUILDING metaphors
in Chen’s speeches.
4.1 OVERALL PERCENTAGE DIFFERENCES
The first and foremost general feature of the Taiwanese data is that BUILDING
metaphors occur less frequently than in the British data. The Taiwanese average
is 15.66 percent, which is roughly two-thirds of the British average. Table 2 gives
the details of each president and a comparison with the British data.
The second point that stands out is Chen’s low use of BUILDING metaphors of
2.9 percent, in contrast with the other presidents’ more frequent use of BUILDING
metaphors. Chen’s nearly complete avoidance of BUILDING metaphors in general
parallels two culture-specific types of BUILDING metaphor use, including the
retrospective BUILDING metaphors and the RECONSTRUCTION metaphors
discussed later.13
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 389
4.2 RETROSPECTIVE BUILDING METAPHORS: LINGUISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL MANIFESTATIONS
Retrospective BUILDING metaphors are the first cluster of BUILDING metaphors
that deserve our attention. They account for roughly 36.43 percent of BUILDING
metaphors in the Taiwan Presidential Corpus (51 of 140 tokens). The main
characteristic of retrospective BUILDING metaphors relates to framing BUILDING
metaphors in a backward-looking way. Some linguistic features of such
metaphors include: first, past references to the establishment of the country are
made, and second, they tend to co-occur with frequent mention of historical
figures, such as the national father or forerunners. Consider Example (2),
where Chiang Ching-kuo makes reference to people’s efforts to contribute to the
country’s founding, and in Example (3) Lee mentions forerunners and also their
contribution to the country as the cornerstones of a building.
Example 2
立國 以來， 一直 朝著 一個 目標—
liguo yilai yizhi chaozhe yige mubiao
found-country since always toward one-CL goal
建設 一個 民有、 民治、 民享
jianshe yige minyou minzhi minxiang
construct one-CL people-own people-control people-enjoy
的 現代 國家— 在 努力
de xiandai guojia zai nuli
DE modern country ZAI strive
Ever since the beginning of the country, (our countrymen in the past) have been trying
to construct a country of the people, by the people, for the people. (Chiang C. 72)
TA B L E 2. Details of BUILDING metaphors
Tokens of BUILDING
metaphors
Total metaphor
tokens Percentage
Chiang Kai-shek 49 288 17.02
Chiang Ching-kuo 38 163 23.32
Lee Teng-hui 45 167 26.95
Chen Shui-bian 8 276 2.90
Total 140 894 15.66
British data a
287 1164 24
a
The British statistics are taken from Charteris-Black (2004). It should be furthermore
noted that although Chiang Kai-shek’s, Chiang Ching-kuo’s, and Lee Teng-hui’s
percentages roughly match the British 24 percent, the use and content of their BUILDING
metaphors are quite different from what Charteris-Black sees in the British manifestos.
This point will become self-evident when we discuss retrospective BUILDING metaphors
and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors.
390 Discourse & Society 19(3)
Example 3
歷史 的 價值 則在於 繼往開來。
lishi de jiazhi zezaiyu jiwangkailai
history DE value lie in continue the past and start the new
我們 獲致 的 一切 成就， 都 來自於
women huozhi de yiqie chengjiu dou laiziyu
we obtain DE every achievement all come from
無數 先賢 志士 犧牲 奮鬥，
wushu xianxian zhishi xisheng fendou
numberless forebear volunteer sacrifice strive
所奠定 的 基礎。
suodianding de jichu
lay down DE cornerstone
The value of history lies in continuing the past and starting the new. Every
achievement we have comes from the cornerstones which were laid down by the
sacrifice and perseverance of innumerable forebears.14
(Lee 86)
At the linguistic level, the two examples mention the construction of the country
in the past and the forerunners, with their act of nation-creation and construction
metaphorically described as putting up a building and laying the cornerstones. At
the conceptual level, the conceptualization involved in retrospective BUILDING
metaphors can be listed as follows: If THE COUNTRY IS A BUILDING, then it
metaphorically entails the following mapping principles (Ahrens, forthcoming):
THE PAST ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE COUNTRY ARE ITS CORNERSTONES in that
a building is founded on cornerstones and a country bases its establishment on
past achievements. Accordingly, THE FOUNDERS OF THE COUNTRY ARE ITS
BUILDERS because if A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING, then a founder contributes to
a country’s early achievement and a builder contributes to the early construction
of a building. Examples (2) and (3) both exemplify this set of conceptual metaphors:
A COUNTRY IS A BUILDING, THE FOUNDERS OF THE COUNTRY ARE ITS
BUILDERS, and THE PAST HISTORY/ACHIEVEMENT OF THE COUNTRY IS ITS
CORNERSTONES, where Example (2) involves the first metaphor and Example
(3) involves all three. Another typical instance is Example (4), in which Chiang
Kai-shek mentions the founding father, Dr Sun Yat-sen, and the cornerstones
that were laid down for the future development of the country:
Example 4
國父 領導 國民革命. . .
guofu lingdao guomingeming . . .
national father lead national revolution
民國 新 基， 於是 始 奠」，
minguo xin ji yushi shi dian
the ROC new groundwork this start lay down
到 今天 已經 整整 六十 年 了…
dao jintian yijing zhengzheng liushi nian le
to today already totally sixty year CRS
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 391
民族 文化 與 傳統 精神， 乃 中華民國
minzu wenhua yu chuantong jingshen nai zhonghuaminguo
people culture and tradition spirit be the ROC
所賴以 始終 不為 邪惡 勢力 搖撼
suolaiyi shizhong buwei xiee shili yaohan
depend on always NEG evil power shake
毀傷 的 基石。
huishang de jishi
undermine DE cornerstone
The national father directed the revolution . . . The new groundwork of the ROC
was laid down at that moment. It has been sixty years since then . . . This cultural
and traditional spirit of striving of our forebears has been the cornerstones on which
the ROC can depend and for which the ROC has neither been moved nor undermined
even when facing evil. (Chiang K. 60)
In Example (3), Lee first mentions ‘the meaning of history’, and then proceeds
with a remark that the achievement the people of Taiwan now enjoy actually
comes from the base laid down by the numberless progenitors of the country,
with their past efforts as laying the cornerstones for the country viewed as a
building. In Example (4), Chiang Kai-shek remarks on the national father leading
the revolution and the foundation understood as cornerstones of the country
laid down ever since. Such language use portrays the country as a building and
the past history as the most indispensable part of a country, as the groundwork
is indispensable to a building. Figure 2 illustrates the metaphorical mappings
between the source and the target domain behind the metaphor pattern:
So far, we have covered the linguistic characteristics of retrospective BUILDING
metaphors and their corresponding conceptual pairings. It is perhaps of more
interest to look into what cognitive operation lies beneath the regulated linguistic
realizations and the conceptual level manifestations. Behind the constrained
mappings we can see how the presidents subtly arrange their metaphor use
to create different worldviews. The reason why such metaphors contain only
the above mappings but not others is because the metaphors are directed
in a backward-looking way and thus involve a different inference pattern
from forward-looking BUILDING metaphors. We argue that in the Taiwan
Source Domain: Target Domain:
BUILDING COUNTRY
BUILDING COUNTRY
BUILDER FOREBEARS
CORNERSTONES HISTORY
LAYING A CREATING A
FOUNDATION COUNTRY
F I G U R E 2. Cross-domain pairings of retrospective BUILDING metaphors.
392 Discourse & Society 19(3)
Presidential Corpus, the underlying frame of retrospective BUILDING metaphors
emphasizes past establishment and glory of laborious national founders
instead of contribution from the electorate as argued by Charteris-Black. Our
world knowledge also includes the information that cornerstones are the most
fundamental part of a building. Therefore, an inference of the earlier frame
arises: the most crucial part of the country is the direct result of the efforts of
those forerunners, who are directly historically related to the country’s Chinese
past. Hearers of the speeches, as citizens enjoying the fruit of these people’s hard
work, should pay due respect to these Chinese people, and to the country because
it is a building with a Chinese origin associated with these Chinese forebears.
Hence, from an illustration at the conceptual level, we have up to now
established that BUILDING metaphors are expressions of aspiration towards
desired social goals only when BUILDING metaphors are framed in a futureoriented
way, so this group of metaphors portrays future country development
as building construction and citizens and political leaders as collaborative
builders, as shown in Figure 1 previously. By contrast, retrospective BUILDING
metaphors represent a set of different inference patterns with the discourse
framed in a reminiscent way, because such metaphors focus on past establishment
of the country as cornerstones of a building and historical figures as builders, as
Figure 2 indicates. That is, if BUILDING metaphors are positioned in discourse
retrospectively, the interpretations discussed in the previous research are not
available because the alternative inference pattern expresses new meaning.
Aligning metaphors in a past-oriented manner thus results in conceptual
correspondences forced by the inference structure associated with the underlying
frame.
4.3 IDEOLOGICAL MOTIVATION BEHIND RETROSPECTIVE BUILDING METAPHORS
Aside from the linguistic features and the conceptual level mappings, it is of
more significance to probe into the motivation behind such a way of producing
BUILDING metaphors in political speeches. In the following we argue that such
framing is attributed to an ideological preference.
As has been laid out earlier, retrospective BUILDING metaphors portray the
country’s past history and achievements as cornerstones. It is noteworthy that
a historical fact of critical relevance to the metaphor use is the government’s
relocation from Mainland China to Taiwan. The national identity issue has
been the major division between the two major parties of the ROC. The KMT,
also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party, identifies itself with Mainland
China and thus represents a Chinese ideology, whereas the DPP would like to
cut off the country from its Chinese past and would like the country to take root
in Taiwan, so is ideologically anti-Chinese and locally based. It follows that
the KMT presidents, especially Chiang Kai-shek, tend to use BUILDING metaphors
in a backward-looking way since such metaphors are reminiscent of the country’s
Chinese history and past glory; whereas, by contrast, the DPP president, Chen
Shui-bian, tries hard to avoid such metaphors since they clash with his
fundamental ideology. The other KMT presidents, Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee
Teng-hui, represent a transition stage between the ideological shift. They employ
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 393
relatively less retrospective BUILDING metaphors than Chiang Kai-shek but more
than Chen.
It is thus natural to surmise that the distribution of retrospective BUILDING
metaphors will be rather uneven among the presidents. Indeed, it turns out so
according to Table 3.
It is clear that Chiang Kai-shek, as the first president after the government
relocation, employs the most retrospective BUILDING metaphors, 60 percent of all
his BUILDING metaphors, supporting the idea that he is the most tilted toward the
Chinese ideology. By sharp contrast, Chen, a representative of the localTaiwanese
ideology of the DPP, barely uses any retrospective BUILDING metaphors as only
12.5 percent of metaphors are retrospective BUILDING metaphors.15
The other
two presidents, using roughly 20 and 30 percent of retrospective BUILDING
metaphors, fall in between as a transition stage.16
An ideological shift is
manifested in the decrease of retrospective BUILDING metaphors use in Table 3.
Another piece of evidence for ideological differences among the presidents can
be reflected in the collocations of retrospective BUILDING metaphors, i.e. the
presidents’ reference to ‘builders’ of the country, i.e. 國父 guofu ‘national father’
and 先烈 xianlie ‘forebears’ as is indicated in Table 4.
The drop in reference to these ‘builders’ is closely related to the percentage
decrease of retrospective BUILDING metaphors discussed earlier. The patterns
are consistent in the way they both mirror a certain way of inclusion of the
country’s Chinese past into the speeches, which is favored by Chiang Kai-shek
TA B L E 3. Distribution of retrospective BUILDING metaphors
Chiang K. Chiang C. Lee Chen
A. Retrospective 29 7 14 1
B. Total BUILDING metaphors 49 38 45 8
C. Percentage of retrospective BUILDING
metaphors (A/B)
59.18% 18.42% 31.11% 12.5%
D. Corpus size (characters) 129,661 20,164 41,851 44,081
E. Tokens of retrospective BUILDING
metaphors per thousand characters
(A/D*1000)
0.223 0.347 0.334 0.022
TABLE 4. Distribution of retrospective BUILDING metaphor’s collocations 國父 guofu ‘national
father’ and 先烈 xianlie ‘forerunners’
Chiang K. Chiang C. Lee Chen
A. Tokens of guofu ‘national father’ 157 26 20 0
B. Tokens of xianlie ‘forerunners’ 69 9 4 0
C. Total number of tokens (A+B) 226 35 24 0
D. Corpus size 129,661 20,164 41,851 44,081
E. Tokens per thousand characters
(C/D*1000)
1.74 1.73 0.57 0
394 Discourse & Society 19(3)
but not by Chen, with the other two also in between. In other words, Chiang
Kai-shek’s frequent retrospective BUILDING metaphor use correlates with
his frequent reference to nation constructors. These linguistic strategies correspond
to the way he frames his discourse in a backward-looking way given his
extreme China-focused ideology.17
4.4 RECONSTRUCTION METAPHORS: LINGUISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL MANIFESTATIONS
RECONSTRUCTION metaphors are the other cluster of BUILDING metaphors that
are of cultural significance in Taiwanese presidential speeches. This cluster of
metaphors are reminiscent of Charteris-Black’s (2005: 117) discussion of Clinton’s
‘repair’ metaphors: ‘Democratic policies are evaluated as constituting a form
of “repair” with the implication that those of the previous administration had
in some way caused a “breach” with the American tradition’. Charteris-Black’s
claim applies as well to the RECONSTRUCTION metaphors we find in the Taiwan
Presidential Corpus, where acts of a group of people are regarded as a ‘breach’
by some others.18
However, an in-depth analysis on the motivation of this group
of metaphors is not discussed in detail in Charteris-Black’s study. We explore
RECONTRUCTION metaphors in the Taiwan Presidential Corpus later.
RECONSTRUCTION metaphors are common in the Taiwan Presidential
Corpus, accounting for over 18 percent (26 of 140 tokens) of all BUILDING
metaphors. We argue that the RECONSTRUCTION cluster involves a unique
discourse framing strategy which underlies constrained conceptual-level
mappings. We also claim that the strategy is motivated by culture-specific
components given the special historical background of our data.
The linguistic manifestations of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors are: the
country is viewed either as an old building that needs to be reconstructed, or as
a new building that needs to be built. The metaphor is used mostly in a hortative
mood. The following instances (Examples 5 and 6) exemplify the linguistic
features of the RECONSTRUCTION cluster:
Example 5
我們 每一個 中華民國 的 國民，
women meiyige zhoghuaminguo de guomin
we every the ROC DE citizen
都 負有 光復 大陸、 重建 民國 的
dou fuyou guangfu dalu chongjian minguo de
all bear restore China reconstruct the ROC DE
責任。
zeren
responsibility
We, every citizen of the ROC, shoulder the responsibility of restoring China and
reconstructing the ROC. (Chiang K. 48)
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 395
Example 6
大家 一齊 來 開拓 . . . 來 建設 這
dajia yiqi lai kaituo . . . lai jianshe zhe
everyone together come carve out come build this
屬於 三民主義 的 新 中國。
shuyu sanminzhuyi de xin zhongguo
belong the Three Principles of the People DE new China
Let’s carve out and build together the new China of the Three Principles of the People.
(Chiang K. 61)
In Example 5, minguo ‘the ROC’ is described as a building and needs to be reconstructed,
and in Example 6, a new China xinzhongguo, referred to as a new
building, is yet to be built. In both instances, a hortative mood, signaled by the
use of women ‘we’ and dajia ‘every one’ and yiqi ‘together’, urges the populace to
strive for future country development.
The linguistic manifestations reflect cross-domain correspondences at the
conceptual level. First, the use of reconstruction or a new building presupposes
that the country, as a building, has been at least partly damaged or fully
demolished.19
The historical fact of the communist takeover of Mainland
China which caused the ROC government’s relocation can be metaphorically
considered to be a damage done to the country understood as a building in the
past. Therefore, the Taiwanese people should, under the encouraging tone of
the president, metaphorically identify themselves with rebuilders of the country
for its future restoration of national glory. A set of conceptual metaphors
can be extrapolated here: THE COUNTRY IS A BUILDING, and the need for its
reconstruction presupposes COMMUNISTS ARE DESTROYERS. As a result, THE
COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF CHINA IS DAMAGE TO THE BUILDING because
destroyers do damage to a building and the presidents think communists do
damage to the country as well. And finally there is CITIZENS ARE REBUILDERS
because ‘re-builders’ work together to reconstruct the building and the populace
work together to reconstruct the war-striken country. Figure 3 illustrates these
conceptual mappings.
Source Domain: Target Domain:
BUILDING COUNTRY
BUILDING COUNTRY
DAMAGE TO TAKEOVER
BUILDING
DESTROYERS COMMUNISTS
REBUILDERS CITIZENS
F I G U R E 3. Cross-domain pairings of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors.
396 Discourse & Society 19(3)
The conceptual mappings of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors differ from
retrospective BUILDING metaphors in that the function of the former is quite
similar to Charteris-Black’s observation of calling for patience and effort from
the citizens, and this cluster is framed in a forward-looking style. However,
crucial differences exist between RECONSTRUCTION metaphors and other
prospectively aligned BUILDING metaphors.The difference of RECONSTRUCTION
metaphors lies in the presupposition embedded in the conceptualization of the
original country (viewed as a building) being ruined and of communists as
destroyers of that building. The above assumption is bound to the historical fact
concerning the communist occupation of Mainland China and its political impact
on the ROC government. The underlying conceptual framework reveals the
metaphorical scenario of a demolished building in need of reconstruction. Such
a conceptualization of the country reinforces the hearers’ identification with the
‘re-builders’ at the conceptual level, as the president’s hortative mood coerces
the inference that citizens, as ‘re-builders’, should work their best to repair the
country, which is compared with a demolished building. It is, therefore, the
tacit inclusion of the historical event and the hortative mood that distinguishes
RECONSTRUCTION metaphors from the other forward-looking BUILDING
metaphors, and it is the direction in which the metaphors are positioned that
distinguishes them from retrospective BUILDING metaphors.
4.5 IDEOLOGICAL MOTIVATION BEHIND RECONSTRUCTION METAPHORS
We have up to this point laid out the characteristics of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors
in Taiwanese presidential speeches. In the following, we further argue that
the motivation behind the framing operation that underlies RECONSTRUCTION
metaphors also boils down to ideological differences, which are parallel to the
motivation of retrospective BUILDING metaphors. As has been pointed out
earlier, the crucial difference between RECONSTRUCTION metaphors and the
other forward-looking BUILDING metaphors is the presupposition of the country
as a damaged building, which conceptually triggers the metaphorical mappings
of THE COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF CHINA IS DAMAGE TO THE BUILDING and
COMMUNISTS ARE DESTROYERS. However, does this presupposition still hold
for Chen, who identifies himself with Taiwan and not with China?
For the KMT presidents, especially Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo,
their definition of the country, the ROC, includes both Mainland China and
Taiwan, of which the major part has been taken away and can be understood
to be metaphorically destroyed. Thus RECONSTRUCTION metaphors make
perfect sense given the ideological consideration. By contrast, for the DPP, their
country refers to Taiwan only, which has nothing at all to do with the communist
possession of Mainland China. Therefore, their country has not been invaded by
communism and is sound, so metaphorically the country needs no rebuilding
at all.20
The statistics of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors in Table 5 support this
explanation, in which Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo use
these metaphors more frequently, whereas the DPP president, Chen Shui-bian,
completely excludes such metaphors from his talks.21
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 397
4.6 CHEN’S DISCOURSE REFRAMING WITH OTHER METAPHORS
AsTable 2 indicates, Chen tries to avoid BUILDING metaphors in general owing to
his ideological constraints. But as a president, reference to country development
in speeches is necessary, so it should be reasonable for him to come up with
other ways to get around BUILDING metaphors but to still talk about country
development.
A close manual search into the corpus identifies JOURNEY metaphors as
an alternative to BUILDING metaphors in talking about country development.
Charteris-Black (2004: 95) also observes that JOURNEY and BUILDING
metaphors ‘are both activities in which progress takes place in stages towards
a predetermined goal’. This explains why in the Taiwan Presidential Corpus
JOURNEY metaphors also serve a similar discourse function to BUILDING
metaphors as they can both convey the progress of a country to its future goal.
Example (7) instantiates the JOURNEY metaphor in Chen’s speeches.
Example 7
台灣 正在 跨越 一道 又 一道
taiwan zhengzai kuayue yidao you yidao
Taiwan being stride one-CL again one-CL
看不見 的 門檻 . . .
kanbujian de menkan . . .
invisible DE threshold
最後 將 通往 民主 自由、 進步
zuihou jiang tongwang minzhu ziyou jinbu
finally will go to democracy freedom progressive
繁榮 的 希望 之 門。
fanrong de xiwang zhi men
prosperous DE hope ZHI door
Taiwan is striding across invisible thresholds . . . And it will finally go through the
gate of hope to democracy and prosperity. (Chen 92)22
This example contains a journey scenario with the country taiwan ‘Taiwan’ as
a traveling agent striding across impediments menkan ‘threshold’ toward a bright
goal xiwangzhimen ‘the gate of hope’. Country development is thus understood
based on the following conceptual mappings: THE COUNTRY IS A MOVING
AGENT, COUNTRY DEVELOPMENT IS PHYSICAL ADVANCEMENT, DIFFICULTIES
ARE PHYSICAL IMPEDIMENTS, and COUNTRY PROSPECT IS A GOAL. The
metaphorical mappings of JOURNEY metaphors are shown in Figure 4.
TA B L E 5. Details of the distribution of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors
Chiang K. Chiang C. Lee Chen
Tokens 15 9 2 0
Corpus size 129,661 20,164 41,851 44,081
Tokens per thousand characters 0.115 0.446 0.047 0
398 Discourse & Society 19(3)
In addition to JOURNEY metaphors, Chen uses two additional metaphors
to talk about Taiwan’s progress: FARMLAND and BUSINESS metaphors, as in
Examples (8) and (9), respectively.
Example 8
已經 達成 以 深耕 台灣、 佈局 全球」
yijing dacheng yi shengeng taiwan buju quanqiu
already achieve with cultivate Taiwan arrange globally
做為 新 世紀 國家 經濟 發展 願景
zuowei xin shiji guojia jingji fazhan yuanjing
as new century country economy development outlook
和 策略 目標。
han celue mubiao
and strategy goal
(The meeting) has reached a strategic goal of cultivating Taiwan to act globally.
(Chen 90)
Example 9
落實 投資 台灣 優先」 的 政策 目標。
luoshi touzi taiwan youxian de zhengce mubiao
realize invest Taiwan first DE policy goal
(We have to) realize the policy of ‘investing in Taiwan first’. (Chen 91)
In the example of FARMLAND metaphor, the country taiwan ‘Taiwan’ is conceptualized
as a farmland, and efforts from the government are metaphorically
described as intensive land cultivation shengeng.23
The example of BUSINESS metaphor refers to the country as something to be
invested upon, with the verb touzi ‘invest’. Table 6 summarizes the distribution
of all these metaphors among the presidents:24
It is obvious from the table that, to describe future developments, Chen’s
preference is tilted toward JOURNEY metaphors, which raises its percentage
to 17.03, almost two times as high as Lee or Chiang Ching-kuo, and four times as
high as Chiang Kai-shek. Some other ways to profile a country’s advancement are
Source Domain: Target Domain:
JOURNEY COUNTRY PROGRESS
MOVER COUNTRY
IMPEDIMENT DIFFICULTY
GOAL PROSPECT
FORWARD DEVELOPMENT
MOTION
F I G U R E 4. Cross-domain correspondences of JOURNEY metaphors.
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 399
FARMLAND metaphors and BUSINESS metaphors, which are quite rare in Lee’s
speeches and are entirely absent in the Chiangs’ talks. Aside from the percentage
difference, it must be noted that, a list of conceptual mappings alone does not
explain the reason why these presidents vary their metaphor pattern in discourse.
Ideological consideration, as has been covered previously, decides the way they
choose to present the discourse, such as whether to use BUILDING metaphors,
how to frame the metaphors used, what alternatives to use in place of BUILDING
metaphors and, most importantly, the conceptual patterns underlying BUILDING
metaphors and the inferential consequences that follow.
It is therefore not until we go deep down into ideology that we get to uncover
the dynamicity of metaphor choice at the discourse level. This corresponds to
Charteris-Black’s (2004) claim that social resources, such as ideology, culture,
and history, play a role in metaphor choice in discourse. In view of this, the
difference of metaphor distribution among the presidents should be put into
perspective under the framework of critical discourse analysis.
4.7 A COMBINATION OF IDEOLOGY, METAPHOR, FRAMING AND PRESUPPOSITION AS THE
OVERALL EXPLANATION
First and foremost, retrospective BUILDING metaphors conceptually involve THE
FOUNDERS OF THE COUNTRY ARE ITS BUILDERS, and THE PAST HISTORY/
ACHIEVEMENT OF THE COUNTRY IS ITS CORNERSTONES. The way these
BUILDING metaphors are interpreted naturally relates the country to its Chinese
TA B L E 6. Distribution of BUILDING metaphors and alternativesa
Token/Total Percentage
BUILDING metaphors Chiang Kai-shek 49/288 17.01
Chiang Ching-kuo 38/163 23.31
Lee Teng-hui 45/167 26.95
Chen Shui-bian 8/276 2.90
JOURNEY metaphors Chiang Kai-shek 14/288 4.86
Chiang Ching-kuo 16/163 9.82
Lee Teng-hui 16/167 9.58
Chen Shui-bian 47/276 17.03
FARMLAND metaphors Chiang Kai-shek 0/288 0
Chiang Ching-kuo 0/163 0
Lee Teng-hui 0/167 0
Chen Shui-bian 6/276 2.17
BUSINESS metaphors Chiang Kai-shek 0/288 0
Chiang Ching-kuo 0/163 0
Lee Teng-hui 3/167 1.8
Chen Shui-bian 7/276 2.54
a
The table reveals Chen’s more diversified source domain choice in his metaphors than
the other three presidents, which echoes Cheng’s (2006: 587) observation of Chen’s
rhetorical strategies: ‘Chen Shui-bian, with the flow of eloquence of an attorney, made
tactical use of the presidential rhetoric’. For a complete list of source domain choices in
the corpora, see Appendix V.
400 Discourse & Society 19(3)
past. Furthermore, RECONSTRUCTION metaphors bring up the assumption that
the country is a demolished building that should be rebuilt by the populace. This
chunk of metaphors is framed in a forward-looking way as other prospectively
aligned BUILDING metaphors are, but at the same time involve a presupposition
that implicitly refers to the Chinese origin of the country. In sum, retrospective
BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors both deviate from
common BUILDING metaphors because they are framed in certain ways in
discourse to communicate particular implicit political messages. At first glance,
retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors entail
different linguistic behaviors and different conceptual mappings following distinct
inference patterns resulting from corresponding ways of framing discourse, but
they both serve as strategies of the KMT presidents, especially Chiang Kai-shek,
to establish a canonical Chinese sociocultural norm via tacit language use.
It is therefore not surprising that, as the first president after the relocation who
wished to restore country integrity, Chiang Kai-shek is most productive in both
the above metaphors, and Chen, who is against Taiwan identifying with China,
by contrast seems to evade both metaphors, which causes his low percentage of
overall BUILDING metaphor use. The percentage gap between Charteris-Black’s
observation on his British corpora and the Taiwan Presidential Corpus can thus
be attributed to the culture-specific ideological difference among the presidents,
which gives rise to different ways of framing BUILDING metaphors and results in
selective, and for some, even extremely limited, use of BUILDING metaphors.
5. Conclusion
This article demonstrates that an uneven distribution of BUILDING metaphor
use exists among Taiwanese presidents because Chiang Kai-shek extensively
employs retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors
for political advantage, while Chen evades BUILDING metaphors as much as he
can and instead turns to other metaphors, which reduces the overall Taiwanese
average compared with the British corpora observed in Charteris-Black’s study.
In addition to the frequency of BUILDING metaphors, in the Taiwan Presidential
Corpus, two different subsets of BUILDING metaphors are identified, specifically
retrospective BUILDING metaphors and RECONSTRUCTION metaphors. The two
subsets of BUILDING metaphors are different in that they trigger conceptual
mappings and communicate different messages that are not reported in
Charteris-Black’s study on English political discourse, which demonstrates
the culture-specificity of metaphor use. At the conceptual level, retrospective
BUILDING metaphors involve a different set of metaphorical mappings from
forward-looking BUILDING metaphors because they are framed in a pastoriented
way. RECONSTRUCTION metaphors, by contrast, although prospectively
aligned, presuppose the country metaphorically as a ruined building breached
by communism. The two sets of BUILDING metaphors both demonstrate how
underlying frames limit linguistic manifestations and conceptual pairings.
Given the above differences in framing choices, the inference patterns and
the subsequent interpretations of both metaphors naturally deviate from the
future-oriented BUILDING metaphors reported in previous literature. Beyond the
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 401
conceptual level, the above interactions of metaphors and frames are ideologically
motivated. Constrained by the ideological consideration, Chen chooses to avoid
BUILDING metaphors and to resort to alternative metaphors such as JOURNEY,
FARMLAND, and BUSINESS.
In sum, our study illustrates how linguistic studies of metaphors probe
conceptual-level mappings as well as the underlying conceptual framework,
and, even more importantly, the social context that subtly motivates the way in
which presidents frame their language via metaphor use for their own worldview.
A study on metaphor choice, specifically choice between types of BUILDING
metaphors in this article, reveals how ideologies can be ingrained, or ‘naturalized’
in Fairclough’s (1995) word, via metaphor manipulation in political discourse
by power elites.
A C K N OW L E D G E M E N TS
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Tenth New Zealand Language and
Society Conference in Christchurch. We are grateful for the conference participants for
helpful suggestions. We also would like to thank Professor Chu-Ren Huang for lending his
financial support in data collection (Project number: 5202401023–2), and thankYi-hua
Kao for help in typing up Chiang Ching-kuo’s speeches into word document files. Special
thanks also go to Teun A. van Dijk and an anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions.
All errors are, of course, our own responsibility.
N OT E S
1. Details of the historical fact can be found at the website of the office of the ROC
president at: http://www.president.gov.tw/en/
2. There are other minor parties in Taiwan. But their political stances are either pro-KMT
or pro-DPP (or so-called pan-blue and pan-green). Only the two major parties have
had presidents elected to office.
3. For details of the concept of frame, see Fillmore (1976) and Fillmore and Atkins
(1992).
4. Croft and Cruse (2004) generalize a four-fold definition of context that includes:
linguistic context, physical context, social context, and stored knowledge. We claim
that the main theme of the article, ideology, corresponds to their social context.
5. This observation is based on the British manifesto corpus of both parties with a
size of 132,775 English words extending from 1945 to 1997 (Charteris-Black,
2004). We certainly expect a sociocultural difference between his data and ours.
An investigation into the difference constitutes the main research focus of this
article.
6. Consider the following example for illustration (taken from Charteris-Black, 2004:
71, italics original): ‘It must get the economy out of recession, it must lay foundations
for the future’ (Labour).
7. The lexemes used to refer to the country vary among the presidents for ideological
reasons. For details of the distribution, see Appendices 1–4.
8. Double Tenth day is a national holiday that celebrates the Xin-hai Revolution. The
reason why only New Year and Double Tenth speeches were chosen is because they
are the only speeches that are nationally televised and thus carry the greatest political
significance.
402 Discourse & Society 19(3)
9. In our corpus, Chiang Kai-shek gave 21 New Year speeches and 20 Double Ten
speeches. Chiang Ching-kuo gave 10 NewYear speeches and 10 DoubleTen speeches.
Lee Teng-hui gave 11 each. Chen Shui-bian gave six each. Character count is based
on the Microsoft word count program.
10. The merits of a manual search through the texts are: (a) We can avoid a predetermined
target word decision. If target lemmas had been chosen in the first place, we would
have arbitrarily and intuitively decided, in an a priori way, what to be included in the
scope of the study and what not to. We may in this way lose important metaphors
if they are not listed in our target lemma list. (b) We can identify null-source
metaphors, especially for a language productive in anaphora such as Mandarin
Chinese. Null-source metaphors cannot be identified unless we manually read
through the whole text.
11. Sinica Corpus is a Chinese online general corpus service available at http://www.
sinica.edu.tw/SinicaCorpus/.
12. An alternative would be to determine mapping principles and source–target domain
pairings from a frequency–collocation-based approach (Gong et al., 2007).
13. An explanation based on post-war rebuilding experience does not make sense
here (cf. Charteris-Black, 2004) because it cannot account for Chiang Ching-kuo’s
and Lee’s frequent use of BUILDING metaphors.
14. The underlined expression jichu is a lexicalized metaphor with the character chu
meaning ‘cornerstones of a building’. The historical origin of the character can be
found at http://words.sinica.edu.tw/sou/sou.html, a corpus-based online collection
of diachronic developments of Chinese characters. For details of lexicalized
conventional metaphors, see Sweetser (1990).
15. Chen’s only use of retrospective BUILDING metaphors was in his speech in 2000.
The temporal scope of the metaphor extends back only to ‘the past four years’ instead
of to the country’s Chinese past, as is typical in the other presidents’ talks.
16. It is at first glance surprising that Chiang-Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son, should
have a lower percentage of retrospective BUILDING metaphors than Lee due to
the Chiangs’ Chinese background. But a closer examination of the data reveals
that Chiang also has a wide repertoire of PERSON metaphors that serve to instill a
Chinese ideology, such as zaisheng ‘rebirth’, jiuguo ‘save the country’, etc. that are
not present in Lee’s talks.
17. Rhetorically speaking, such a strategy may correspond to ‘nostalgia’ mentioned
by Charteris-Black (2005). However, in this article we simply focus on the conceptual
and ideological significance of the retrospective BUILDING metaphor use.
Furthermore, the sharp contrast of BUILDING metaphor use between the Taiwan
President Corpus and Charteris-Black’s British Party Manifesto Corpus may be
attributed to Ahrens and Huang’s (2002: 499) observation that an important
difference between Chinese and English concepts of time is: For the conceptual
metaphor TIME PASSING IS MOTION, ‘in Chinese the ego is oriented toward the past’
but the ego is faced toward the future in English. Always talking about the past can
in other words be a common phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese but not in English.
However, this alternative explanation does not undermine the ideological impact on
BUILDING metaphor use given the radical difference between Chiang Kai-shek’s and
Chen’s speeches.
18. Clinton’s metaphors describe the relation between two major parties in a single
country, but in our case, the political context is more complicated. Some may regard
the groups involved as two parties in civil war (Communist vs. Nationalist) but some
others may consider them to be different countries (People’s Republic of China vs.
Taiwan/Republic of China).
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 403
19. The definition of presupposition is based on Levinson (1983: 175): ‘A sentence A
semantically presupposes another sentence B if: (a) in all situations where A is true,
B is true (b) in all situations where A is false, B is true.’
20. A frequency count of the direct object of the verb chongjian ‘reconstruct’ reflects
that the Chiangs’ favorite target domain lexeme is zhongguo ‘China’, followed by
zhonghua(minguo) ‘the ROC’, with no tokens of taiwan ‘Taiwan’ at all. The result
matches the ideological explanation provided here. For detailed information, see
Appendices III–IV.
21. It might appear surprising that Chiang Kai-shek’s RECONSTRUCTION metaphor
use per thousand characters should be lower than Chiang Ching-kuo’s. If we take
into account the rhetorical structure of presidential speeches and the length of
speeches of the presidents, however, we can account for this fact. RECONSTRUCTION
metaphors are often accompanied by the hortative mood in presidential speeches,
and such combinations occur mostly in the last, or the second to last, paragraph
of presidential speeches, usually right before the final political slogans such as
zhonghuaminguo wansui ‘long life the ROC’. Also note that in Table 1 Chiang Kaishek’s
average length of speeches is more than three times as long as Chiang
Ching-kuo’s. Therefore, the particular position of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors
within the speeches and Chiang Kai-shek’s much more lengthy speeches result in
his lower use of RECONSTRUCTION metaphors per thousand characters.
22. In the following instances, the country is referred to as Taiwan, which is frequent
in Chen’s speeches and can be explained by his ideologically embedded country
identity. This finding echoes that of Cheng (2006: 591), who showed that Chen
makes frequent use of taiwan ‘Taiwan’ to highlight Taiwanese identity.
23. The lexeme identified in this cluster of metaphor is always shengeng ‘to cultivate
deeply’ instead of a general verb of planting gengzhong ‘to cultivate’, which is more
productive in the source domain.
24. FARMLAND metaphors and BUSINESS metaphors are relatively lower in percentage
so here we choose to mention them just in passing without going into metaphorical
mappings at the conceptual level. Also, their linguistic repertoires are rather
restricted too, with shengeng and touzi as the only example of FARMLAND and
BUSINESS metaphors respectively.
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LO U I S W E I -LU N LU is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National
Taiwan University. His current research interests include: cognitive pragmatics/semantics,
particularly metaphor studies, Buddhist language, and a critical approach to language
in society. A D D R E S S : Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, 104
No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd, Taipei, Taiwan. [email: wllu@ntu.edu.tw]
K AT H L E E N A H R E N S is a Professor at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics and the
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. Her
current research interests include lexical semantics and conceptual metaphor theory.
Please address correspondence to her. A D D R E S S : Graduate Institute of Linguistics,
National Taiwan University, 104 No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd, Taipei, Taiwan. [email:
kathleenahrens@yahoo.com]
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 405
A P P E N D I X I . Chen Shui-bian’s complete list of BUILDING metaphor use
台灣taiwan ‘Taiwan’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
基地jidi ‘basement’ 1
Total 1
中華民國zhonghuaminguo ‘the ROC’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 1
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 1
Total 2
國家guojia ‘the country’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 2
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 1
根基genji ‘root-foundation’ 1
基石jishi ‘cornerstone’ 1
Total 5
A P P E N D I X I I . Lee Teng-hui's complete list of BUILDING metaphor use
中華民國zhonghuaminguo ‘the ROC’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 2
根基genji ‘root-foundation’ 1
Total 3
國家guojia ‘the country’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 21
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 8
根基genji ‘root-foundation’ 3
基業jiye ‘foundation-work’ 2
丕基piji ‘great foundation’ 1
鴻基hongji ‘big foundation’ 1
格局geju ‘layout’ 1
改造gaizao ‘reconstruction’ 1
工程gongcheng ‘construction’ 1
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 1
Total 40
中華民國在台灣zhonghuaminguozaitaiwan ‘the ROC in Taiwan’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 2
406 Discourse & Society 19(3)
A P P E N D I X I I I . Chiang Ching-kuo's complete list of BUILDING metaphor use
中國zhongguo ‘China’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 7
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 1
Total 8
中華民國zhonghuaminguo ‘the ROC’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 6
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 2
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 1
堡壘baolei 'castle' 1
Total 10
國家guojia ‘the country’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construction’ 10
Total 10
我國woguo ‘our country’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 1
復興基地fuxingjidi ‘revival base’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construction’ 8
規模 guimo 'dimension' 1
Total 9
Lu and Ahrens: BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese presidential speeches 407
A P P E N D I X I V . Chiang Kai-shek's complete list of BUILDING metaphor use
中國zhongguo ‘China’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 11
建設jianshe ‘construct’ 3
再造zaizao ‘re-create’ 2
砥柱dizhu ‘standing pillar’ 1
柱石zhushi ‘pillar-stone’ 1
Total 18
中華民國zhonghuaminguo ‘the ROC’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
基礎jichu ‘foundation’ 3
屹立yili ‘stand firm’ 2
屹立不搖yilibuyao ‘stand firm and fast’ 2
支柱zhizhu ‘pillar’ 2
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 1
砥柱dizhu ‘standing pillar’ 1
基業jiye ‘foundation-work’ 1
基石jishi ‘cornerstone’ 1
Total 13
民國minguo ‘the ROC’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 1
再造zaizao ‘reconstruct’ 1
Total 2
國家guojia ‘the country’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construction’ 7
根基genji ‘root-foudnation’ 1
重建chongjian ‘rebuild’ 1
奠基dianji ‘lay foundation’ 1
磬石之固qingshizhigu ‘firmness of ground stones’ 1
國基guoji ‘national foundation’ 1
Total 13
台灣taiwan ‘Taiwan’ as a BUILDING
Expression Tokens
建設jianshe ‘construction’ 3
408 Discourse & Society 19(3)
A P P E N D I X V . The presidents’ source domain choices
Chen Lee Chiang C. Chiang K.
BUILDING V V V V
PERSON V V V V
COMPANY V V
PLANT V V
BOAT V V
FARMLAND V
CAR/TRAIN V
WATER FLOW V
CRADLE V
HEART V
PARADISE V
BUTTERFLY V
COMMODITY V
HOME V
BOOK V
MOUNTAIN V