A Cognitive Study On War Metaphor In Disaster News Reporting

Metaphor study, which can be traced back to Aristotle, has been the interest of rhetoricians and linguists for more than 2000 years. According to the views on whether metaphor is a matter of language or a matter of thought, metaphor studies fall into two general types:the traditional theories and the contemporary theory of metaphor. The traditional views hold that metaphor is just a property of words; it is a linguistic phenomenon used for some artistic and rhetorical purposes. The contemporary theory of metaphor, which was first developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980 in their book Metaphor We Live By, challenges all the aspects of traditional views by claiming that metaphor is a property of concepts rather than words; its function is to better understand certain concepts, and not just to achieve some artistic or aesthetic purposes.In recent years, "disaster" becomes one of the hottest issues in both Chinese and English media and more and more scholars have stepped into the study of disaster news report from different perspectives and with different focuses, such as writing techniques and stylistic features. The author found that it is no difficulty to find war metaphors in disaster reporting. However, few works on this have been done. Therefore, this paper tries to study war metaphor in disaster news reporting from the cognitive perspective to interpret people's thoughts in this process.The case studies reveal the mapping processes between war and disaster relief, which again demonstrates that metaphors are not arbitrary, but are primarily, rooted in common human bodily experiences. The author also conducted the analysis of war metaphor in disaster news from the quantitative and qualitative approaches respectively. The quantitative analysis shows the frequency of war metaphor adopted in disaster news reporting. It is found that:1. War metaphor is dramatically frequently used in disaster news report, especially the Chinese ones; 2. Most of the expressions are general description of war and few are for detail fight in war; 3. the frequency of war metaphor adopted in disaster news reduces over time; 4. Metaphors from the domain of family are also used frequently. The qualitative analysis is to interpret the reasons from the perspective of media and culture.This thesis sheds light to the research of metaphor from a cognitive perspective, in hope of making a little contribution to both disaster news reporting and metaphor study.