A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Chinese And US News Reports On Sino-US Trade Issues

The development of the world's economy and globalization accelerates economic interactions between countries. China and the US, as the largest developing and the largest developed countries, have established an important trading partnership. During their frequent business interactions, disputes and problems arise inevitably. However, trade issues are more than just economic problems and sometimes are motivated by certain political intensions. The Chinese and the US media keep a close watch on the on-going incidents and produce abundant news reports on this topic. On the one hand, the media releases timely reports concerning the facts. On the other hand, through their perspectives of reporting and choices of linguistic structures, the media implies their own attitudes and standpoints towards trade issues.The current study focuses on conceptual metaphors that appear in the Chinese and the US news reports concerning Sino-US trade issues. A comparative analysis was conducted to examine the differences and similarities in the use of metaphors between the Chinese and the US media. Further interpretation and explanation were given to the identified metaphors in order to reveal the media's attitudes, values and ideological intensions.This study was conducted within the framework Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) developed by Chateris-Black in 2004, which consists of three stages of metaphor analysis: metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. This method is applied to examine the use and choices of metaphor with the purpose of exploring the relationships between metaphors, thoughts and social knowledge and revealing emotional political and ideological intensions that motivate such metaphor choices. In this study,50 pieces of news concerning the Sino-US trade issues were selected from Xinhua Net as the Chinese data source and 50 pieces from the New York Times as the English data source. From the selected news reports, eight major conceptual metaphors were identified. The source domains of the eight conceptual metaphors are "War", "Conflict", "Game", "Drama", "Coldness or Darkness", "Disease" and "Journey". Through further analysis of the eight conceptual metaphors within the CMA framework, the following major findings were obtained:1) This study supports some basic viewpoints of CMT:conceptual metaphor are frequently used in news discourse on the topic of the Sino-US trade issues; mappings within the frames of conceptual metaphors are systematic.2) The attitudes and the values of the media usually represent their standpoints and conform to the interests of their mother country.3) Through particular use and choices of metaphors, the media describes the roles that China and the US play in their bilateral trading relationship. The Chinese and the US media both believe that despite difficulties, China and the US can cope with these problems and maintain a developing and prosperous trading partnership...