| Since China joined WTO in2001, an increasing amount of economic reports about China’s economy have been published in foreign media. Metaphorical expressions can reveal the implicit attitudes of the media towards Chinese economy. Since the proposing of Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson in1980, an increasing amount of studies have been done of economic metaphors. However, the study of economic metaphors from critical discourse perspective is scant, let alone researches on Chinese economic metaphors.Using a revised theory, which is the combination of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Blending Theory (BT), this thesis studies Chinese economic metaphors in a large corpus, in which the84articles are selected from2001and2010in the weekly magazine TIME. The relevant articles every two years form a sub-corpus. The Chinese economic metaphorical expressions are chosen with two steps:using KWIC search in AntConc to find the potential economic metaphorical expressions which are later analyzed through MIPVU to determine the exact economic metaphors—134metaphorical expressions. This paper aims to reveal the attitudes of economic metaphors conveyed from the perspective of critical discourse analysis with three steps, namely metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation and to explore the conceptual metaphors of Chinese economic metaphors, that is, Chinese economy is a living organism, an object, a vehicle, a machine and a building. Further more, the paper explains how economic metaphors convey the attitudes and ideologies of the foreign media in order to find the changing attitudes of the foreign media towards Chinese economic development during these ten years. The foreign media hold a strong bullish attitude towards the Chinese economic development in2001and2002and change to hold a wait-to-see attitude towards the Chinese too fast economy from2003to2010. |
