A Study On Conceptual Metaphors In New York Times On Hong Kong Event Reports From The Perspective Of Critical Metaphor Analysis

Since June 2019,the Hong Kong event has attracted a lot of attention,and relevant news reports have emerged one after another.As a special type of discourse,conceptual metaphor combined with political discourse in current political news reports can play a guiding role in strengthening the public’s cognition of relevant events.In 2004,Charteris-Black proposed a new method of metaphor analysis—critical metaphor analysis,in which the methods of cognitive linguistics,pragmatics and corpus are comprehensively applied to analyze the conceptual metaphors in discourse,so as to reveal the cognitive model,ideology and power relations implied by them.Theoretically based on the critical metaphor analysis,this study takes the conceptual metaphors in New York Times reports on Hong Kong event from June 2019 to May 2020 as the research object.There are three research questions in this thesis:(1)What are the features of the conceptual metaphors used by the New York Times in its coverage of the Hong Kong event?(2)What are the meanings of the above conceptual metaphors and how are they constructed?(3)What is the underlying intention behind the meaning construction of the conceptual metaphors?Firstly,the research shows,there are eight conceptual metaphors in the corpus collected.These conceptual metaphors in the report show the overall universality,individual centralization and marginalization,the consistency and diversity of internal systems and the experientiality.Secondly,the underlying meanings are constructed in three ways.1)the reporter centralizes the war metaphor,supplemented by other conceptual metaphors,which makes the attitude of meaning construction of conceptual metaphor shift to the setting direction on the whole,and then constructs the meanings that HK event is a war without smoke,Hong Kong became a flashpoint for conflicts,etc.And,2)according to the hierarchical cognitive view of critical metaphor analysis,The New York Times uses multiple sub-conceptual metaphors which can be classified as a class of conceptual metaphors to make semantic integration and form metaphorical schemas,thus facilitating the construction of meaning.What’s more,3)the internal mapping mechanism of conceptual metaphor makes the cognitive connection of different systems possible,which is one of the main factors causing cognitive bias.The mechanism of meaning construction of conceptual metaphor in this study is the result of the interaction of these three ways.Finally,behind the New York Times’ reports on the Hong Kong event is the political intention of the western countries to contain China and to seek political self-interest.