| News report has attracted the attention of linguists all the time, because it is of great value in both social and linguistic field. As it concerns the relationship among writer, text and reader, communication and interaction must be involved. However, throughout the history of linguistic studies on news reporting, most of them are related to its internal structures, social function or cognitive mechanisms, research from the perspective of the theory of communicative action is rare.This thesis discusses the interactive relations between cognitive and social factors in news reportings from the perspective of the theory of communicative action, and integrates communicative action theory and conceptual metaphor theory into a News Reporting Model(hereinafter referred to as NRM), in order to explore how two subjects(the reports' writer and readers) reach intersubjectivity and mutual understanding through the interaction between metaphors and social norms. By using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, the study selects 20 Ebola news reportings in 2014 on Xinhua News Agency and the New York Times, and their statistical analysis is presented. Statistics show that there are similarities in the selection of conceptual metaphors in both English and Chinese news reportings. WAR metaphor, HUMAN BEING metaphor, JOURNEY metaphor, CONTAINER metaphor and BUILDING metaphor are all employed to explain the spread, prevention and treatment of the disease. Under the framework of the News Reporting Model(NRM), this thesis analyzes top three most frequently used conceptual metaphors, and finds that news reportings are actually communicative actions with interactions between writers, readers and news reportings. This interaction is actually an integration of cognitive processing, news events and social norms/ ideologies. Conceptual metaphor, as a necessary cognitive tool, is the key to link three worlds together, and its interaction with social norms is conducive to the establishment of the intersubjectivity in the communicative action. The formation of Ebola news reportings contains a cognitive processing and social processing of writers and readers, which contains the employment of conceptual metaphor to conceptualize news events, and shared understanding of traditional social norms. This interaction of cognitive and social processes can help subjects form understanding, so as to ensure the successful delivery of information, reach the target of harmonious dialogue.This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is a detailed introduction concerning motivation of the research, its objective and significance, and data and methodology of this study. The second chapter full revisits those linguistics studies on news reportings in recent years, and makes comments on them with achievements and gaps. The third part introduces the theoretical framework in this study and the News Reporting Model(NRM) is formed. The core part of this study lies in the fourth chapter, in which analysis of the corpora is presented and the application of the model is explained with figures and tables. The last part serves as the ending, in which major findings, implications, suggestions for the future study are provided. Through theoretical innovation, this study attempts to enrich the study of conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics, presents a new perspective for the writing and reading of news reportings, and makes effort to seek the possibility of conducting interdisciplinary research between linguistics and communication studies. |
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