Discursive Representation Of President Trump In The US Press

Since Donald Trump became President Trump in 2017,a “war without gunfire” between Trump and the US press has begun.The conflict reached its climax during the “fake news” period.In defense,Donald Trump verbally accused the US press in public of publishing “fake news” and being “the enemy of the people”,thereby the US press,led by The Boston Post,fought back against President Trump — in August 16,2018,more than 300 American journalists jointly refuted him with almost 400 editorials in response to his remarks.There are a large number of researches where the role metaphor plays in the construction of identity is discussed,but that of relationship is not covered.In this paper the author attempts to analyse how metaphor is used to construct Trump's identity and the relationship between Trump and the US press during the fake news period.Based on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory and Charteris-Black's critical metaphor theory,the author uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the 206 reports against Trump's accusation of “fake news” collected for research by using the AntConc corpus analysis tool,aiming to examine how the US press constructed the relationship between Trump and the press during the “fake news” period.This research takes three steps — metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation,together with the metaphor recognition program proposed by Pragglejaz Group.The context and the sociocultural background are taken into consideration as well.As an extension of the research,the author also discusses how Trump constructed his own identity and how he and the U.S.press interacted on Twitter.The author finds that mainly seven types of metaphors are used in the counter-attack reports published by the U.S.press: the war metaphor,the human metaphor,the health metaphor,the construction metaphor,the animal metaphor,the material metaphor and the game metaphor,by which the antagonistic relationship between Trump and the US press is established.The research also shows that these types of metaphors play an important role in the construction of relationship and textual meaning and that by classifying the metaphors according to attitude,the press' attitudes towards Trump are involved in three levels: uncompromising,hostile and objective.This thesis is a new attempt to study the construction of relationship from the perspective of the critical metaphor analysis.It is expected to be a work of reference for future research.