A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Litical News Discourse

Metaphor studies have been widely explored in a variety of linguistic fields, including semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics, at home and abroad. Meanwhile metaphorical view has transferred from a matter of language to thought and action. Yet the previous study that focuses on the linguistic aspect of metaphor is far from enough since it overpasses the other aspects of metaphor related to social reality. In this sense, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the thesis adopts Critical Metaphor Analysis to study metaphors in the2012American presidential election news as a case study of political news discourse.The thesis specifically selects eight pieces of news from the online resource The Washington Post, aiming at revealing the dialectical relations between metaphor and ideology in the election news. To this end, based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, with the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis, the thesis analyzes metaphor in terms of its working mechanism, characteristics as well as functions in political news discourse by means of identification, interpretation and explanation.With reference to the political news discourse, the thesis identifies five major conceptual metaphors, namely, WAR, JOURNEY, BUILDING, PERSON, and FAMILY, which are further elaborated on the revelation of ideology underlying these metaphors as well as the motivation of metaphor usage by editors and politicians. As a result, some findings are achieved as follows. First, metaphor is omnipresent as conceptual metaphors are frequently employed in political news discourse. Second, in the political news discourse, the thesis yields three ideological functions, namely, evoking readers’ emotions, drawing public consensus, and legitimating politician’s ideology. Third, the comparison of different metaphor usages by Democrat and Republican implies that the former adheres to the mass line with friendly image, while the latter adopts hard-line ideas in policy; Fourth, metaphor and ideology are in a dialectical relationship: metaphor serves as the reflection of ideology while ideology, in turn, affects and even changes the usage of metaphor. In general, the study of Critical Metaphor Analysis on political news discourse can raise critical awareness and political sensitivity of news readers so as to help English learners understand and improve reading skills in learning newspapers.