A STUDY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN SEVERAL OF BARACK OBAMA’S 2013 SPEECH AND REMARKS ON ECONOMIC CRISIS

Abstract

Revealing Barack Obama‘s political strategies based on the use of metaphorical expressions within his speech and remarks is the purpose of this research. Furthermore, this research discusses more about the use of metaphor in some political speeches and remarks. The primary data in this research is transcripts of Barack Obama‘s political speech and remarks on economic crisis. This research attempts to apply the conceptual metaphor theory to describe, classify and explain in the field of economical discourse: because, there are many metaphorical expressions in Barack Obama‘s political speech addressed economy as their target domain. This domain most commonly used source domains include building, plants, journey (Kovecses, 2002:22). These three conceptual metaphors are frequently seen and used in Obama‘s political speech and remarks. Therefore, the study of metaphor on Barrack Obama‘s speech and remarks is needed to interpret the metaphorical expressions in the field of pragmatics. The theory of conceptual metaphor proposed by George Lakoff and comparison theory on metaphor proposed by G.A. Miller taken from Stephen C. Levinson‘s books are used in this research. Those two theories are used to analyze and interpret the metaphorical expressions in Obama‘s speech and remarks. As the result of this research Barack Obama uses many metaphorical expressions within his speeches and remarks. The metaphorical expressions play an important role in the speeches and remarks and are not just artistic or aesthetic purposes in Obama‘s speech and remarks on economic crisis.