A Contrastive Analysis Of Frames In American And Chinese News Reports On"Occupy Wall Street Movement"

The study of conceptual metaphors in political discourses has long been the center of discussion in the field of cognitive linguistics. With the development of Frame Theory in the field of cognitive linguistics, the study of conceptual metaphor in political discourses has become increasingly inseparable with the investigation of frames and moral models behind the metaphors. It is assumed as a fundamental finding in cognitive science that frame and conceptual metaphor are closely supplementary with each other. Lexical items in discourses can activate frames; and the mapping from one frame to the other constitutes conceptual metaphor. News reports on political events usually have rich metaphorical expressions, which may serve as a significant tool for parties to conceptualize political issues and transmit their morality values to audience.This thesis offers a preliminary cognitive linguistic analysis of frames in American and Chinese News Reports on "Occupy Wall Street Movement" on the basis of Frame Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The corpora for the present thesis are collected from news reports on "Occupy Wall Street Movement" in electronic versions of both American and Chinese quality papers. The American corpus comprises of10news reports taken from the Washington Times; and10from the New York Times, which contains20news reports in total. The Chinese corpus comprises of10news reports taken from the People’s Daily and the Guangming Daily respectively, which also contains20news reports in total.Major findings of the current thesis are as follows:Firstly, dominant frames in American corpus are Self-reliance Frame, Competition Frame, Empathy Frame, etc., while dominant frames in Chinese corpus are Fairness Frame, Natural Force Frame, Disease Frame, etc. Secondly, the Washington Times constructs the discourse of "Occupy Wall Street Movement" on the basis of Strict Father Model, while the New York Times constructs this discourse on the basis of Nurturant Parent Model. Thirdly, Chinese newspapers take a Nurturant Parent Model as the base of morality model in reporting "Occupy Wall Street Movement", which is similar to the Democratic Party. The similarity can be attributed to the influence of China’s "Socialist Core Value System". Fourthly, all frames in American corpus are non-metaphorical frames, while frames in Chinese corpus contain not only non-metaphorical frame but also metaphorical frames. The differences can be mainly attributed to the two countries’different core values, fundamental interests and cultural traditions. In summary, the contrastive study reveals that frames of different types can reflect and reinforce the underlying morality values of America and China. Thus, the study is conductive to provide for audience a more scientific account of American and Chinese newspapers’morality standpoints and reasoning logic in reporting the "Occupy Wall Street Movement".