| In recent years,with the problem of environmental pollution becoming more and more serious,the relationship between ecology and language is becoming a research hotspot of scholars at home and abroad.Many scholars try to study various kinds of ecological discourse with the theory of ecological discourse analysis,but contrastive studies on ecological metaphor in ecological environmental news discourse are relatively few.For this reason,this study aims to analyze ecological metaphors in eco-environmental news reports in People’s Daily and The New York Times from 2018 to 2020,and to explore the similarities and differences between the use of ecological metaphors.The study adopts the research method of combining qualitative research with quantitative research.Eighty eco-environmental news reports published from January 1,2018 to December 31,2020 in People’s Daily and The New York Times were selected as corpora.English corpus contains 48,348 words and Chinese corpus contains 44,792 words.Besides,the corpus tool Antconc 3.5.8 was used to retrieve the metaphorical keywords and combined with the method of Critical Metaphor Analysis to analyze news discourse from three aspects: natural ecological metaphor,social ecological metaphor and spiritual ecological metaphor.The following results can be drawn:(1)Among natural ecological metaphors,biological metaphor,material metaphor and color metaphor are common ecological metaphors of the two corpora.In the People’s Daily corpus,the color metaphor is the most frequent natural ecological metaphor,accounting for 25.37%,and the biological metaphor is the unique natural ecological metaphor,accounting for 8.59%.In The New York Times corpus,material metaphor is the most frequent natural ecological metaphor,accounting for 19.90%.(2)Among social ecological metaphors,building metaphor,war metaphor,money metaphor,journey metaphor,machine metaphor,human body metaphor,stage metaphor,and exam metaphor are common social ecological metaphors in two corpora.In contrast,judicial metaphor and game metaphor are unique social ecological metaphors in The New York Times corpus.(3)In the spiritual ecological metaphors,personification metaphor is the common ecological metaphor shared by the two corpora,while myth metaphor only appears in the People’s Daily corpus.By the elaboration of specific examples of ecological metaphors,it can be found that the similarity between Chinese and American ecological metaphors is based on the similarity of people’s cognitive experience.Meanwhile,the differences in ecological metaphors are mainly caused by the differences in culture,religion,and eco-environmental policies between these two countries.This study is helpful for news writers to better use the power of language to protect the ecological environment,hoping to improve reader’s awareness of environmental protection and promote readers to better understand different cultures and ideologies between different countries. |
