| Lakoff and Johnson believe that conceptual metaphor is pervasive in everydaylife. As we can see, conceptual metaphor also exists in military news headlines. Thisthesis discusses how conceptual metaphor is employed in news headlines to elaboratethe different ideologies and power control of the reporters about Sino–PhilippineSouth China Sea disputes. All the news headlines found in VOA news and ChinaDaily form the data of this study. Expressions like “South China Sea”,“ChinaPhilippines”, and “Huangyan Island” are served as the key words, searched from April1,2012by the websites’ search engines.48headlines are matched in VOA newswebsites and48headlines are found in China Daily.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a way of making critical social researcheson the relationship among language, power and ideology through detailed discourseanalysis. For CDA analysts, ideology refers to the hidden everyday beliefs which areoften shown in conceptual metaphors and analogies. One aim of CDA is to reveal theideologies implied in discourse through detailed data analysis so as to show the powerrelations and people’s identities.Lakoff and Johnson classified conceptual metaphor as orientational metaphor,ontological metaphor and structural metaphor. The headlines are categorized by different conceptual metaphors with the methodology of quantitative and qualitativeanalysis. The following six metaphors are mainly used in the analysis: up/downmetaphor, container metaphor, human metaphor, water metaphor, war metaphor andgames metaphor. Among48VOA headlines,20use UP/DOWN metaphor,4headlinesuse container metaphor,5use human metaphor, only1headline from VOA news useswater metaphor,3headlines use war metaphor,15VOA headlines use gamesmetaphor, which respectively account for41.6%,8.3%,10.4%,2%,6.3%and31.2%.Among48headlines from China Daily,26use UP/DOWN metaphor,4use containermetaphor,8use human metaphor,2headlines use water metaphor,2headlines usewar metaphor,6use games metaphor, which respectively account for54.2%,8.3%,16.7%,4.2%,4.2%and12.5%.By the contrastive study, the results show that: firstly, all the six sub-categoriesof conceptual metaphors are frequently used in American and Chinese news headlines;secondly, the employment of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American websitesdiffers significantly from each other; lastly, conceptual metaphor is proved efficientand effective under propaganda in establishing positive and negative images of anevent or entity.According to the above findings, some implications can arise from the research results. First of all, conceptual metaphors impact greatly on shaping images, andconceptual metaphors are efficiently employed in news headlines of important events.Then, conceptual metaphors work more on the cognition level. Besides, conceptualmetaphors deserve watching in the researches of communication. Last but not least,news headlines from different news agencies are by nature politically andideologically determinedThis thesis has some practical significance. Fewer Chinese scholars haveresearched the conceptual metaphor in military news headlines especially the newsheadlines about Sino-Philippine South China Sea Disputes. This thesis is devoted tofill this gap and provides a new perspective for news headline studies. Besides, thisthesis also reminds readers of keeping an eye on the ideology hidden behind militarynews and developing an independent judgment of news information.But some limitations cannot be avoided in this thesis owing to the limited timeand knowledge of the author. For example, the data needs to be broadened; someless-occurred conceptual metaphors in the news headlines are not discussed in thisthesis. Besides, the discussion is primarily depends on the author’s owncomprehension and decision, so something less rigorous in the discussion may not beavoided. |
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