| In linguistics,metaphor has been widely concerned by scholars.At the beginning of the 20th century,the study of metaphor took an important turn.Scholars no longer regarded metaphor as a rhetorical device,but began to regard metaphor as a cognitive way of human conceptual system.Scholars at home and abroad begin to study metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,and put forward conceptual metaphor,and there is a lot of room for the research on the use of conceptual metaphor in disaster news.This article collects 35 news reports of Tianjin port explosion from Chinese Daily and CNN as corpus,and makes a comparative study based on the conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson in the book Metaphors We Live By.Through empirical and quantitative analysis method,this paper discusses about what are the similarity and differences in the use of conceptual metaphors in both Chinese and American reports on "Tianjin port explosion",what ideologies are revealed in Chinese and American media and what factors influence the ideology.This paper finds 8 categories of conceptual metaphors in the corpus;they are war metaphor,journey metaphor,military metaphor,conflict metaphor,container metaphor,natural environment metaphor and school metaphor,human metaphor.And two different metaphors are used in the corpus:human body metaphor and school metaphor.The comparative study result shows that the Chinese and American media through the selection of different metaphorical types on Tianjin port explosion to reveal different ideologies.War metaphor,journey metaphor,military metaphor and conflict metaphor are used in Chinese and American reports.The difference is that China uses human body metaphor to emphasize the true feelings,the intuitive description and experience of the blast site,while the American media chooses school metaphor,they pay more attention to the lesson that the explosion that brought to China.According to the news reports of Tianjin explosion,both Chinese and American media show the attention on the blast site,the concern for the wounded,and the sympathy for the victims’ families.But the Chinese media tends to establish the positive image of Chinese government and reports more about how Chinese government takes active action and deploys rescue toward the explosion.While the American media continues to reveal the existence of security risks in China,and also puts more emphasis on the lessons of the explosion brought to China.This difference not only shows the different national ideology between China and the United States,but also reveals that the journalists’ personal ideology is also the reason for the difference of the reports.On the one hand,this study enriches the research content of conceptual metaphor and enhances the explanatory power of conceptual metaphor theory.On the other hand,it discusses the common types of metaphor in disaster news and the similar and different conceptual metaphor types in the two languages,which deepens our understanding of the genre of disaster news,and makes the readers strengthen the critical thinking and guard against the western ideology penetration in the future news reading. |
