Cognitive Analysis Of War Metaphors In COVID-19 Reports

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging suddenly home and abroad,the Chinese media adopted a collection of war metaphors to report the pandemic,such as “pandemic prevention and control war” and “soldiers in white”.Those phrases reflect the cognitive relevance between the pandemic and anti-epidemic war of Chinese nation.This thesis focuses on the war metaphor to analyze pandemic reports from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Based on a collection of relevant linguistic materials,this thesis divides war metaphors in pandemic news reports into three frameworks: PEOPLE,VENUE,WAR SUPPLIES.Within the guidance of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis analyzes war metaphors in COVID-19 pandemic report,that is,the mapping and interrelationship between the elements in the war source domain and the pandemic target domain.After analysis of corpus,it is found that(1)The frequent use of war metaphors in Chinese pandemic reports is due to cultural idiosyncrasies of traditional Chinese wars,which includes historical,cultural and political reason;(2)Identifying and describing cultural specificity helps to compile a collection of disparate cognitive features of Chinese war metaphors.It is a triangular structure of the Party’s unified leadership,cooperation in pandemic control and people-oriented thought;(3)Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of the authentic language,Chinese war metaphors have more cognitive power than English war metaphors,because of the broad expressions and the function of inheriting traditional Chinese culture;(4)War metaphors are used frequently in epidemic reports because the war against pandemic is a manifestation of benevolence,justice and cooperation.The significance of this thesis lies that:(1)Through identifying the origin of the specificity of Chinese military culture,this thesis sums up that Chinese war metaphors are influenced by the history of Chinese wars,the cultural concepts(the country is home,people as the center…)and the political system of centralized and unified leadership;(2)This thesis compares the differences between Chinese and English war metaphors and constructs the unique structure of war metaphor cognition under the background of COVID-19,which shows that conceptual metaphors have cultural specificity and unique cognitive power of Chinese war metaphors;(3)This thesis answers the question why Chinese reports prefer war metaphors in the context of COVID-19.