National Image Construction of New Year Addresses by Xi Jinping from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

The New Year Addresses by Chinese President Xi Jinping has the function of conveying New Year’s blessings and constructing a national image. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics, this study selects the English version of New Year Addresses by President Xi Jinping from 2014 to 2021 as the research corpus and adopts the method of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify the distribution of conceptual metaphors in the New Year Addresses and what kind of national image has been constructed by the main conceptual metaphor types. It is found that President Xi Jinping’s New Year Addresses mainly constructs the national image through the use of journey metaphor, construction metaphor, war metaphor, and personification metaphor. China’s image is political integrity, full of vitality, committed to world peace, and making a greater contribution to humanity.