A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of The Reports On China-US Trade In New York Times

Business reporting refers to news about trade,finance,technology and other business events.As it involves lots of abstract,complicated and technical terms,journalists employ metaphors to refer to them quite often.Most domestic metaphor studies in business news are based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,in which the imbalance of reporting topics reflects that researchers have paid more attention to economic news while focus less on other hotspots.To enrich the metaphor research in different topics of business reporting,this study takes Critical Metaphor Analysis as the perspective and analyzes the conceptual metaphors employed in the reports on China-US trade in New York Times so as to clarify how the media realizes the meaning constructions through metaphors on the one hand and find out the metaphor functions on the other.There are three research questions in this thesis:1.What metaphors about China-US trade are used in New York Times?2.How are the meaning constructions realized through conceptual metaphors in the reports?3.What are the functions of metaphors in the reports from the critical metaphor perspective?As Conceptual Metaphor Theory is firstly put forward by Lakoff & Johnson in 1980,scholars begin to focus on metaphor's cognitive mechanism,based on which CharterisBlack proposes the theory of Critical Metaphor Analysis in 2004.It is this new theory that contributes to metaphor study from unfolding conceptual mapping to exploring the underlying ideologies and the social agency and social roles of metaphor in particular context and different types of discourse.This study builds up a small business reporting corpus of 60 China-US trade reports from New York Times and deals with it by the corpus software AntConc 3.4.3 and the manual label software AnnoTool.According to the three stages of CMA: metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation,the conceptual metaphors and underlying ideologies are expounded.This study has three major findings: Firstly,according to the metaphor types that are drawn by Charteris-Black(2004)and specific bodily and social experience,this research finds out nine types of metaphors,i.e.,war metaphor,conflict metaphor,journey metaphor,competition metaphor,spatial movement metaphor,human metaphor,disease metaphor and drama metaphor respectively.As the distribution shows,the domains of war are most frequently employed and the conflict domain also takes up the second highest frequency.Besides,the sums of these two domains' total tokens and that of their total resonance are also much higher than those of the rest of domains,which means the major ideologies are hidden in these two types of metaphors.Secondly,New York Times constructs underlying meanings in two ways.On the one hand,journalists centralize the major metaphors of war and conflict,thus marginalize minor metaphors and employ different levels and numbers of metaphor expressions for each domain to realize the mapping and meaning transferring for understanding China-US trade.In this way,meanings like China-US trade is as fierce as war,China-US trade is just like a conflict and so on are constructed.On the other hand,according to the hierarchical conceptual levels in Critical Metaphor Analysis,metaphorical expressions are hierarchically organized into different abstract levels.This kind of organization can contribute to biological metaphor schemas in the reporting,which helps to deliver the intended meanings.Finally,based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis,this study summarizes two functions of metaphor.On the basis of individual experience and social experience,the journalists employ these particular metaphors in their reporting,which can be used to highlight the ideologies of the media and persuade readers to accept their ideas and evaluations.This study not only provides a new perspective for metaphor studies in business reporting,but also enriches the studies on particular topics of business news.Besides,it can arouse readers' critical awareness of understanding China-US trade news reports.