| The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson hasbeen one of the most influential metaphor theories ever since1980. It pulled metaphorstudy out of the yoke of the traditional rhetorical research and proposed a strikingtheory that metaphor underlies our thinking patterns and daily behaviors, whichmeans our concept in nature is metaphorical. A lot of related studies and researchesfrom then on have been carried out to prove or enrich the conceptual metaphor theory,and the areas where it is applied have kept on growing to include literary analysis,politics, law and social issues, mathematics and psychology, etc. Based on theChinese and American disaster news reports about the2008Wenchuan Earthquake,the author aims at identifying and then categorizing the conceptual metaphors in thesenews reports so as to figure out the similarities and differences of the metaphors in thedata, in the hope of exploring the deep-rooted causes which lead to the results.Language affects and reflects people’s mental process, so the metaphoricalexpressions, which are governed and organized by the metaphorical concept can, tosome extent, mirror and reflect people’s attitudes towards the physical world aroundthem. The analyses in this thesis are carried out from the critical point of view.Through the analyses of the conceptual metaphors in the Chinese and American newsreports about the Wenchuan earthquake by employing the analytic tool of criticalmetaphor analysis (CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black (2004), it can reveal both theChinese and American disaster-attitudes which might play a vital role in shaping andaffecting the metaphorical expressions in the disaster news reports.The thesis chooses60pieces of disaster news about the Wenchan earthquake, with30Chinese pieces and30American pieces, and two corresponding corpus are establishedas the basis of the contrastive analysis.After a thorough investigation and careful contrastive analysis of conceptualmetaphors, the main results are as follows:First of all,14different categories of conceptual metaphors are found in the Chinese corpus and16in the American corpus and these two corpora share12conceptualmetaphors.Secondly, there are four functions of the conceptual metaphors in the disaster news:simplification, motivation, defining reality and "filtering", i.e., highlighting andhiding.In addition, it is found that the Chinese media adopt a purely positive attitude and it isthe pure positive image of China that is propagated in the Chinese news. However, theAmerican media’s attitudes towards China’s response to the2008Wenchuanearthquake are more mixed, which are half positive and half negative. Both thenegative and positive image of China are promoted through the American media.The author hopes that it may shed some light on the development of systematic studyon metaphors in the disaster news reports and in the further understanding of Chineseand American cultures. |
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