An Analysis Of Political News Discourse Based On Conceptual Integration Theory

Conceptual integration theory was formally put forward by Fauconnier(1997)in his book Mapping in Thought and Language.Most scholars focus on stylistic analysis with this theory,but few analyze political news discourse,especially Sino-US trade war news discourse.The researcher,based on the conceptual integration theory of Fauconnier and Turner,analyzes the news discourse of SinoUS trade war,involving the main types of conceptual integration theories used in political news discourse and the meaning of Chinese media implied in political news discourse,so as to provide reference for readers to understand the news discourse.Three research questions are designed as follows:(1)What are the types of conceptual integration networks involved in the collected news discourse on Sino-US trade war?How are these conceptual integration networks employed to explain the complex cognitive process of news discourse?(2)What are the cognitive processes involved in analyzing news discourse based on conceptual integration networks,and how are these cognitive processes employed to analyze the implied meaning of news discourse?(3)What are the implications of the analysis for readers' appreciation of the implied meaning behind political news discourse?The corpus selected in this paper comes from three news websites:China Daily,People's Daily and Xinhuanet.The author collected overall 219 news reports from August 2017 to December 2018 on the above websites,including 105 on the website of China Daily,88 on the website of Xinhuanet and 26 on the website of People's Daily.Based on the above three research questions,researcher discusses the selected corpus by combining quantitative and qualitative methods.The following conclusions are drawn:(1)In the collected political news discourse on Sino-US trade war,the types of conceptual integration networks involved are simple network,mirror network,single-domain network and double-domain network.Through the establishment of various mental spaces under different networks and the cognitive operation of the synthesis mechanism,the dynamic process of news discourse meaning generation is explained.(2)The conceptual integration theory is used to analyze the political news discourse of Sino-US trade war following the three cognitive processes of composition,completion and elaboration.In the blended space,the emergent structure is generated through the composition of projected elements and structures,and the completion and elaboration of the three cognitive operation processes,and new meanings will be generated in this structure.(3)The researcher analyzes the relevant political news discourse in the two stages of Sino-US trade war based on conceptual integration theory,and the analysis results can be used for reference in the research on the explanatory power of political news discourse and the improvement of readers' appreciation ability.By revealing people's understanding of the cognitive operation behind the political news discourse,readers can analyze the ideology implied in the political news discourse and help them more objectively express their personal views on news events.