| The study of metaphor has a long history, which can be traced back to Aristotle. Traditionally, metaphor is regarded as merely a figure of speech, deviating from ordinary language use. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published a remarkable book Metaphors We Live By, marking the "cognitive turn" of metaphor study. In this book, they put forward the Conceptual Metaphor Theory for the first time. According to this theory, metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a way of thinking. It pervades our language, thought, action as well as daily lives. The essence of metaphor is that we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning, and abstract reasoning is largely governed by metaphorical mappings. Metaphor is a powerful tool of cognition, and we map the experience of the source domain onto the target domain. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory provides a new perspective for metaphor study.Metaphors also appear in news discourse. Numerous studies have been carried out to research metaphors used in news discourse and the researches are fruitful. However, most of the previous researches only focus on a few fields of news discourse, such as news of economy, politics and sports. Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this thesis attempts to conduct a cognitive study of metaphors in English news reports of natural disasters. The data used in this study are 44 news reports of natural disasters selected randomly from the online editions of two newspapers, The New York Times and USA Today. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted aiming to describe and analyze conceptual metaphors in English news of natural disasters.The research results show that metaphor is prevalent in English news reports of natural disasters. The pervasiveness and experientialism of metaphor get fully reflected in natural disaster news.14 typical types of conceptual metaphors are found in the data to conceptualize abstract and complex phenomena in natural disasters. They are HUMAN metaphor, WAR metaphor, CONTAINER metaphor, SPATIAL metaphor, GAME metaphor, JOURNEY metaphor, ANIMAL metaphor, DAILY NECESSITIES metaphor, MACHINE metaphor, VEHICLE metaphor, LIQUID metaphor, BUILDING metaphor, OBJECT metaphor, NATURE metaphor and PLANT metaphor. Among these conceptual metaphors, HUMAN metaphor, WAR metaphor, and CONTAINER metaphor account for the major part of the total metaphors in the data. This study can facilitate our understanding of English news of natural disasters. Meanwhile, the results of this research confirm the core argument that the cross-domain mapping is the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphor. |
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