THE METAPHOR POWER OF XI JINPING’S PUBLIC SPEECHES

Oleg I. Kalinin
Moscow State Pedagogical University
Military University of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Russian Federation

Annotation

This article analyzes two public speeches of the President of the PRC Xi Jinping: at the meetings of the 12th and 13th convocations of National People’s Congress of China. These two texts are similar in extralinguistic and content terms, up to the verbatim iteration of some sentences. The aim of the research is to analyze the hidden intentional characteristics of these texts. The author offers an original methodology for identifying implicit intentions based on the calculation of metaphoric indexes: the index of density, intensity and functionality of metaphors. The use of these indexes has a theoretical foundation and is based on valid proven methods, in particular, the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIPVU). The study showed that with all the similarity of the analyzed texts, the speech in 2013 (12th convocation) is distinguished by the desire to structure some socio-political concepts, in particular, the concept of the «Chinese way». The speech at the NPC’s 13th convocation sets new issues on the political agenda.

Keywords: metaphor power, socio-political discourse, metaphor density, metaphor functions, metaphor intensity index, Xi Jinping

For citation: Kalinin Oleg I. The metaphor power of Xi Jinping’s public speeches. Sociolinguistics, 2020, no. 3(3) [online], pp. 101–112.

DOI: 10.37892/2713-2951-2020-3-3-101–112