A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Disaster News Reports

For more than2000years, the studies in metaphor have already triggered great interests of many researchers in linguistic circle. George Lakoff&Mark Johnson’s representative work Metaphors We Live By is believed to be the pioneer work in this field, in which Conceptual Metaphor Theory is initiated to regard metaphor as an indispensable cognitive tool for human beings to conceptualize the abstract entities by virtue of the concrete ones. Up till now, various genres of discourses have been analyzed based on this theory. However, few studies have been conducted through the contrastive analysis of both English and Chinese disaster discourses. Recently, with the frequent disasters and their huge impacts on human society, disaster news reports have become the major concern to both the ordinary readers and the scholars in the linguistic field. At the end of2004, the wall-to-wall coverage of the devastating tsunami in Indian Ocean countries was presented in different languages, which has provided abundant data for the contrastive study of cognitive metaphors. In line with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the present thesis attempts to make a contrastive study concerning conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese news of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and provides answers to the following questions:(1) What are the general features of the English and Chinese disaster news reports?(2) What are the conceptual metaphors widely used in English and Chinese disaster news reports?(3) What are the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors employed between the English and Chinese disaster news reports?(4) Why do the conceptual metaphors employed bear such similarities and differences?The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. In chapter one, the brief introduction of the background, the aims and the organization of the thesis are given. In chapter two, a detailed literature about the metaphor studies at home and abroad as well as the previous studies on disaster news reports is reviewed. In chapter three, theoretical foundation of the present research by mainly discussing the classification, characteristics and working mechanism of conceptual metaphor proposed by George Lakoff&Mark Johnson are specified. In chapter four, the data analysis of conceptual metaphors in both English and Chinese Disaster News Reports is done. Firstly, some background information of the Indian Ocean Tsunami is introduced. Secondly, the description of the data, research procedure and research questions are presented. Thirdly, conceptual metaphors in the two data of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in2004are identified and classified. Finally, contrastive analysis is made between them through the case study of the top four categories co-existed in the two data. The features of the disaster news reports are first summarized. Then, the similarities and differences are found and accounted for between the conceptual metaphors existing in Chinese and English data. In the last chapter, the major findings, implications of the present study are summarized and some suggestions for the future study are provided.In this thesis, forty news reports are randomly selected as the English and Chinese data from two influential newspapers, New York Times and People s Daily. With the adoption of the qualitative and quantitative methods, thirteen categories of conceptual metaphors are found, among which there are seven similar conceptual metaphors that appear in English and Chinese data. Moreover, the top four categories, namely War Metaphor, Journey Metaphor, Container Metaphor and Human Being Metaphor, occur most frequently in both data. With the employment of a large number of different types of conceptual metaphors, the disaster news reports are characterized by suddenness, timeliness and vividness. The similarities are due to the resemblance that human beings bear in their brain structure, embodied experiences and image schemas while the subtle differences come from diversity among various cultures.The contrastive study in disaster discourse not only demonstrates the characteristics of conceptual metaphors as pervasiveness, systematicity and cultural coherence and the great explanatory power of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but provides another perspective for the teaching and learning the reading and writing skills of disaster discourses by virtue of the analysis of the features of the English and Chinese disaster news reports.