Andre Lam:
Low De Wei:
Singapore is at a turning point. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said during the National Day Rally this year, Singapore is at a crossroad, and it is time for the government to adopt a new approach towards governing our country to ensure prosperity and happiness for Singaporeans ahead.
The main reason for this change is due to the gains of the opposition Workers’ Party in the General Elections as well as of course, the by-elections which is the main focus of our group. But behind that, what made them captivate Singaporeans’ hearts? What drew Singaporeans to their rallies and what was said to get them to mark that cross for the opposition on Election Day? Therefore, to understand the reasons behind the change, we embarked on this project to find out how what was said in those rallies so critical in the oppositions’ shocking results, which broke all predictions.
From the start, there were many challenges. How do we use the software? How do we procure the rally speeches? Hurdles were waiting for us every step in the project. Some speeches had to be typed out, and after much frustration and experimenting, we got the hang of the software we needed to use, and it was fun and enriching to use the software and understand and find the conceptual metaphors used in the speeches.
My group mates were enjoyable to work with. Of course, there were many instances of friction, especially with our busy school schedules, with activities like CCA and so on. However, the experiences, like Andre’s annoying but entertaining antics, Howard’s flat puns were all unforgettable and encouraged me in doing my research. There were also misunderstandings of course, like when we argued about our research and the conceptual metaphors we thought up of, but we also learnt the importance of keeping calm, having a plan and communicating with each other, so as to ensure that we can do our project well and make sure that we do our project well and on time.
I learnt a lot too in the course of this project. I learnt new lessons of course about the long-emphasized qualities like teamwork, patience, and so on. But more than the generic things, after much brain-rattling, I could finally understand what Conceptual Metaphors were, how they worked and how they were used in speech. It gave me a greater insight into how politicians spoke, and I now look at what politicians say in a new light, as from this project, I have learnt that be it Obama, Kim Jong Un or Lee Kuan Yew, conceptual metaphors are an essential tool that all politicians use in their speech. I also started to understand how these seemingly unnoticeable parts can have a effect on the audience. Be it tugging at their hearts, making them agree with what is being said, making them become angry, sad, happy or excited, conceptual metaphors can influence the decisions of their audience and have a great effect beyond the speech itself.
Personally, I have also grown, as my first time doing a Non-Experimental project had been an eye opening one. Doing a literature review, reading research papers and such was new to me, who had been used to doing projects such as Service Learning, which was vastly different. It was also my first time using software to get readings and deduce conceptual metaphors from the results. Then there are the usual issues like presenting skills, as I had much to learn from better skilled presenters like Andre as well as our predecessors. The lessons that I have learnt have been very beneficial to me, as I continue to work hard and try improving myself, both in academics and in character.
I realized that the concept of a group presentation is essential and beneficial to me as I have learned much from my members. In the end, I feel that this is a good idea, as we get the best of not just both worlds, but three worlds. To be able to draw knowledge from different pools of people, we can synthesize and initiate the inception of greater concepts, ideas and bring fruition to our imagination.
This journey had been a long one, but it was not a regrettable one, with mishaps, laughs and lessons all adding on to the great experience, and ultimately, I came back to the aim that I had embarked on this project to achieve, and that is to understand how the Workers’ Party had been able to captivate voters’ hearts and gain their trust in the past two by-elections. I am happy to say that I finally understand how they had done so, but more importantly, see the importance of language in our daily lives, and these lessons will stay with me as I face new decisions in future, new challenges, and new influences by seeing the mechanisms at work behind what is being said.
Howard Yang:
Through the process of this project, I've encountered various challenges and problems but luckily we managed to work together and pull through at the end with style and finesse. Time-old and cliche problems like lack of common free time for discussion and brainstorming, novel challenges like learning to use a brand new tool (And to get really good at using it, and fast!), newfangled and frustrating obstacles like a bad Internet connection and insufficient processing power, we meet all of them face on and overcame them with a spirit of 自强不息. It was truly a rewarding experience to work with my fellow group members Andre and De Wei, and though we may get mad at each other at times, the bonds between the 5 of us *wink* were tempered like steel in a furnace and we emerged closer and more bonded with each other than ever.
A rather thought-provoking lesson I've learnt from this project is that although tools like WMatrix and SketchEngine can help us in the process of identifying the Conceptual Metaphors utilised in the PAP and WP speeches by picking out significant words or catagorising them into the relevant USAS Semantic Domains, it still comes down to human intuition and interpretation at the end when we need to form the Conceptual Metaphors.
An extremely unnecessary problem was one of memory. Despite having taken down notes, most of the time we couldn't say exactly what happened and will have to check with each other and cross reference our memories. Sometimes, when we couldn't remember exactly how to use SketchEngine, we would go online and search for tutorials on Google and YouTube. Thank goodness for the vastness and breadth of the Internet!
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