Using a Corpus of English and Chinese Political Speeches for Metaphor Analysis

Using a Corpus of English and Chinese Political Speeches for Metaphor Analysis Kathleen Ahrens1, Huiheng Zeng2, Shun-han Rebekah Wong3 1,2Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 11 Yuk Choi Road, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong 3HKBU Library, Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong kathleen.ahrens@polyu.edu.hk, winnie.zeng@connect.polyu.hk, rebekahw@hkbu.edu.hk Abstract In this article, we present details of our corpus of political speeches and introduce using the corpus for metaphor analysis in political discourse. Although specialized corpora on a variety of topics are now easily available, online political corpora available for public use are scarce. The database our research team has developed contains more than six million English and Chinese political speeches and is currently available free online. Researchers in many fields are able to use the multiple search functions on the website for their specific research purposes. In particular, the corpus is useful for researchers focusing on political speeches and conceptual metaphor analyses. From the perspective of metaphor study, we have taken advantage of several functions to facilitate the corpus-based metaphor analyses. In short, this database enriches the current bilingual resources and contributes to the evaluation of political language by linguists and political scientists. Keywords: corpus, political speeches, metaphor 1. Introduction The rising prominence of corpus-driven approaches in linguistic studies has sparked a growing interest in applying a corpus-based approach to metaphor analysis in the political domain (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2009; Ahrens, 2009; Deignan, 1999, 2005; Semino, 2006, 2008; Deignan and Semino, 2010). The corpora used in these studies are usually compiled manually by authors, i.e. Charteris-Black (2009) collected data of British parliamentary debates from online versions of Hansard, while Koller and Semino (2009) assembled a corpus of interviews and speeches by Germany chancellors from the official websites of the German government. However, these corpora have not been released and made available for public search or free use. Our project proposes the creation of a corpus entitled ‘The HKBU Corpus of Political Speeches’ which is a large- scale political database with English and Chinese data and featured search functions; it is convenient for corpus-based research and also available for online free use. Two major design features of the HKBU Corpus of Political Speeches are as follows: 1. The minimal interface of the database website is designed for users to operate easily. Similar to Sinica Corpus 4.0 (Chen et al., 1996), the search functions of our database such as the keyword-in- context (KWIC) search and collocation search can retrieve the lexical frequency and collocation lists which facilitate a corpus-based approach to linguistic analyses. Our database is especially useful for metaphor analysts who are able to search keywords in the source domains and the target domains of a particular metaphor and extract all the data involving the keywords searched into Excel files for further analyses. In addition, the collocation search and left one sort or right one sort functions can contribute to the determination of specific source domains or target domains of the keywords. Examples of studies that have used corpora to …

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