A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In News Headlines On The Employment Of Chinese College Students

College students’ employment has become a serious problem nowadays. Measurements have been taken by socialists, journalists, even politicians. However, linguists seldom notice the linguistic value of this problem, which provides a novel perspective to study conceptual metaphor in newspaper titles about Chinese college students’employment, since newspaper title is the eye of a piece of news, a crucial media for spreading this problem.The thesis is characterized by qualitative and quantitative approach. Almost three thousand headlines from three quite authoritative newspapers have been collected to build a corpus, the People’s Daily, the Guangming Daily and the China Youth Daily from 2006 to 2014. First of all, the author has identified nearly one thousand headlines from them. Then the linguistic data has been classified, based on the classification in the conceptual metaphor theory, namely structural metaphor, ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor. Moreover, the analytic tools of cognitive linguistics have been applied to the explanation of the corpus, such as image schema and mapping from source domains to target domains.The study shows that the structural metaphor is the most frequently used metaphor in newspaper headlines about Chinese college students’employment, accounting for nearly half of the total. The commonest source domains of it are TRANSPORTATION, WAR, BUILDING, WEATHER, FOOD, and PLANT. The variety of the source domains results from the complicated employment issue. It can be explained by coherence, one of the characteristics of conceptual metaphor. Ontological metaphor stands in the second place among the three types of conceptual metaphors. It also plays a key role in the conceptualization of certain employment issue, for instance the employment rate and employment discrimination. The third one, orientational metaphor provides a significant approach to structure the concepts of employment issue, such as up-down, in-out, front-back, center-periphery. Among orientational metaphors in this study, the commonest one is the up-down direction, among which the former appears more frequently, which reflects people’s cognitive attitude toward employment issue, expecting the positive side. Furthermore, the cognitive analyses indicate that conceptual metaphor is based on human daily experience, like orientation, container, and human body. So the physical, physiological or social basis of metaphorical expressions can be found in people’s experience for a long time.Finally, the study manifests that the conceptual metaphor theory can be used to explore the newspaper headlines about college students’ employment problem. For one thing, it enriches the theory itself. For another, it provides a brand-new approach for the study of this problem, the cognitive linguistic view.