A Study On Metaphors Of News Reports On The Belt And Road Initiative In American Mainstream Media From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The world is undergoing major development,great changes and readjustment.Peaceful development and win-win cooperation have become the mainstream of the times.The Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)has attracted much public attention at its beginning.The thesis makes a metaphor analysis of the American mainstream media's news reports of the Belt and Road from the perspective of metaphor scenario,a fictive scenario formed by the interaction of meanings of metaphorical expressions in the source domains of conceptual metaphors in texts.Scenario-related concepts,evaluations and assumptions are activated to construe the target concept.The thesis mainly uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the collected corpus.Firstly,the source domain candidates containing metaphorical words in news reports on the BRI in American mainstream media are identified by the software Wmatrix through semantic tagging.Then metaphorical words used in news reports are determined with the help of Metaphor Identification Procedure(MIP).Metaphor scenarios are constructed through the semantic interaction of metaphorical words.The prominent characteristics of metaphor scenarios are analyzed from the attitude resources distribution of metaphorical words based on the attitude system in Appraisal Theory.The related concepts,evaluations,assumptions and prominent characteristics of metaphor scenarios are activated to construe the target domains.In the process of construal,metaphor scenarios taking metaphorical words as carries in news reports constitute different topics related to the Belt and Road Initiative.The underlying attitudes towards the BRI are shown in the process of framing different topic as well.The analytical results show that the commonly used metaphor scenarios in news reports are friend-making,competition,and war.The main topics constructed are China's bridge building vs.America's wall building,America's distrust of the Belt and Road projects,and fierce competitions and strained relations between China and America.At the same time,most news reports of American mainstream media have negative attitude towards the BRI.The thesis analyzed news reports in terms of metaphor scenario,which provides a new perspective for metaphor study and offers some implications for the implementation and publicity of the Belt and Road.