A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Sino-US Trade War News Reports Based On Corpus

The US is the largest trading partner of China.With the trade exchanges between the two countries,trade frictions occur frequently.The media of various countries competed to report the news related to the trade war between the two countries,and the media of China and the US also reported the update of the trade conflict.In trade news discourse,conceptual metaphor is widely used.Few scholars have made a systematic and comprehensive comparative study of conceptual metaphor in Sino-US trade war news reports from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.This research is based on Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory.The research subjects are news reports on the Sino-US trade war from China Daily and CNN website.The thesis aims to analyzes and compares the use of conceptual metaphors in Sino-US trade war news reports in China Daily and CNN website.In this research,100 articles are collected from both websites and online corpus analysis software-Wmatrix is used to identify conceptual metaphors and extract data.The results shows that the top three common semantic domains in China Daily and CNN corpora are “Business: Selling”,“Money: Cost and price” and “Business:Generally”.In addition,by comparing and analyzing the conceptual metaphor vocabulary in China Daily and CNN corpora,it is found that the two corpora have fifteen common source domains and two different source domains,of which “(F)Food and farming”,which only exists in China Daily corpus,“(T)Time”,which only exists in CNN corpus.Besides,four common types of conceptual metaphors are compared and analyzed.From these four conceptual metaphors,media attitudes of the two countries towards the Sino-US trade war were analyzed.China has always advocated win-win cooperation rather than launching a trade war.However,the media of the US shows that the aim of the US is to maintain its hegemonic position.They think the trade war is necessary,and the winner must be divided.Finally,three factorshave impacts on the choice of conceptual metaphors,namely,different worldviews,different concepts of interpersonal relationships,and different views on the time between China and the US.Therefore,based on readers’ understanding of different conceptual metaphors used by Chinese and American media in news reports,readers can more accurately understand news reports about the Sino-US trade war,make clear the author’s cultural background and comprehend the author’s attitude towards the event.