A Study On Tropes In Economic English News Headlines Based On Conceptual Integration Networks

With the rapid development of information technology and the popularity of mobile electronic devices,newspapers and journals are no longer important sources of information.At the same time,advanced technology has also made the twenty-first century an era of information explosion,and there are thousands of news reports on the same event in a short period of time.News headlines,as the information that readers read first,play a crucial role that summarizes the theme of the news and attracts readers.Therefore,various rhetorical devices are adopted by news editors to make news headlines vivid and attractive.As a result,to study rhetorical devices in news headlines is crucial in the era of information.Now,there are numerous studies which focus on news headlines.Many of those studies summarize the lexical and syntactic characteristics,rhetoric features,and translation strategies of English news headlines.However,there is a lack of studies on the application of rhetoric devices in news headlines based on quantitative study.This thesis probes into the cognitive process of rhetorical devices in economic news headlines on the basis of conceptual integration theory.Conceptual integration theory was proposed by Fauconnier and Turner in 2002.This is a theory based on mental spaces and cross-space mapping,and the theory reflects the cognitive process of people’s psychological activities.Conceptual integration networks include simplex networks,mirror networks,single-scope networks,and double-scope networks.In terms of methodology,this study adopts qualitative-based and quantitative-based study methods.The present study is dedicated to answering two research questions: First,which tropes are frequently used in economic news headlines? Second,how to interpret the cognitive process of frequently used tropes by conceptual integration networks? At first,the author collected 1,000 economic news headlines from the international section of CNN website as research materials.According to the rhetorical classification proposed by Leigh in 1994,the distribution of rhetorical devices is investigated in the collected news headlines.The result of statistics shows that there are four most commonly frequently used rhetorical devices in economic news headlines,including metonymy,personification,metaphor and rhetorical question.Then the author analyzed the news headlines with four commonly used rhetorical devices by conceptual integration networks to explore readers’ cognitive process.This study hopes to make a reference for improving the attractiveness and conciseness of news headlines by exploring the cognitive operation process of news headlines.At the same time,this study also hopes to provide some help to the edition and teaching of English news headlines.