| In December 2019,the first case of novel coronavirus was discovered,and this outbreak gradually developed into an unprecedented global crisis that attracted continuous attention from domestic and international media.To June 1 2020,there are more than 10,000 reports of COVID-19 on the Chinese Xinhua News Agency’s Xinhua Net,and many of them contain metaphors.Metaphorical research on diseases and epidemics began in the late 1970 s by Susan Sontag and has been widely studied since then.Since the public’s access to information about epidemics is mainly through mass media,the motives and effects of metaphor used in epidemic news reporting are worth studying.Since there has been no studies on how the Chinese Xinhua News Agency constructs the epidemic through metaphors so far,this paper attempts to conduct a study on this issue and analyze how Xinhua News Agency conveys information and achieves communicative effects through the use of metaphor.In this study,the reports about the COVID-19 pandemic from December 2019 to June 2020 by Xinhua News Agency were collected for metaphor analysis.After manual selection,a total of 340 reports were obtained as the corpus.Drawing on the Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA)method proposed by Charteris-Black,the analysis was conducted at three levels: metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation,and metaphor interpretation.The metaphor types and the relationship between metaphors and news stance are analyzed and discussed.The study found that a total of six types of metaphors were used in the report,including war metaphor,orientational metaphor,plant metaphor,container metaphor,landform metaphor,and disaster metaphor,among which,war metaphors accounted for more than seventy per cent of the total.In addition,in the war metaphors,Xinhua News Agency used such imageries as “the enemy”,“winning the war” and “blocking the war” to personify this pandemic,describing the virus as the enemy while constructing the medical personnel and others as the warriors on the battlefield,whereas in the ontological metaphors like plant metaphor,container metaphor,landscape metaphor,and disaster metaphor,the COVID-19 was constructed as negatives,such as desert,disaster and crisis.These metaphors reflect Xinhua’s resolute resistance to the COVID-19,and at the same time,show that mainstream media of China play an essential role in boosting morale and creating an atmosphere of active resistance to the epidemic.In this study,the author analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the war metaphor of disease from multiple perspectives,which has certain social value and significance.First,the analysis of Xinhua News Agency’s COVID-19 report will help people to understand more deeply the important role of China’s mainstream media in major crisis events.Second,through the study of the social function of metaphor in the media,people can pay more attention to the use of metaphor. |
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