A Comparative Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Sino-US Trade Tension Reports

In the past two years,China and the United States,the world’s two largest economies,have been caught in a protracted full-scale trade dispute.The United States has provoked conflicts in this dispute,while China was put on a defensive state.This issue was heavily reported by both countries’ media,but the discourse of the report was seldom studied from the perspective of critical metaphor analysis,for most conceptual metaphor analysis focused on the political discourse.This study investigates how China Daily and New York Times represented this event with different metaphors.Specifically,this study poses the following questions: What do the two media choose as the major types of conceptual metaphors for representing the Sino-US trade issue? How do different kinds of conceptual metaphors systematically map different aspects of the Sino-US trade issue? What belief and attitude do reporters convey and how do this affect readers’ perception of the Sino-US trade issue? What are the similarities and differences between the two media’s metaphorical representations?In order to answer these questions,this study uses the Critical Metaphor Analysis’ approach to identify,interpret,and explain the conceptual metaphors of the two selfbuilt corpora containing news reports from China Daily and New York Times.By using MIPVU as the identification procedure,twelve conceptual metaphors are found in both corpora.Among them,JOURNEY,WAR,and CONFLICT metaphors take up more than 60% of the total usage of metaphorical linguistic expressions.Other than the three major types of conceptual metaphors,nine minor source domains including BUILDING,HUMAN,GAME,SPATIAL MOVEMENT,NATURE,DISEASE,DANGER,ART,and MACHINE have their different aspects mapped onto the issue of China-American trade.These twelve conceptual metaphors can be classified into three generic conceptual keys.The first is based on reification: SINO-US TRADE IS RULEBASED ACTIVITY.The second is a personification one: SINO-US TRADE IS HUMAN ACTIVITY.The third is a depersonification representation of the issue: SINO-US TRADE IS PHYSICALLY EXISTING ACTIVITY.With three major conceptual metaphors at the center,these conceptual metaphors form a complementary network that report the issue from multiple aspects,revealing that the two newspapers incorporated subtle positions and ideologies into their news reports in order to justify the actions taken by the country to protect and promote its own interests.China Daily dials down the hostility level involved in the issue and preferred JOURNEY metaphors to indicate the time and effort needed for the two countries to jointly solve the problem,emphasizing China’s passive defense position in the trade conflict.New York Times’ WAR metaphor uses alone,on the other hand,is almost equivalent to the sum of WAR and CONFLICT metaphors’ proportion in China Daily,showing its hardline attitude towards China and its perception that the U.S.is merely practicing its role of defending the international trade order and its national interests infringed intentionally by China.The result of this study shows that conceptual metaphors play a key role in quickly allowing people to grasp abstract concepts(e.g.,Sino-US trade),relations(e.g.,SinoUS relation),and macro-level actions and events(e.g.,trade policies and legislation).By choosing different metaphors,writers actively highlight aspects and features they intend to emphasize(e.g.,America’s role of “maintaining justice”)and persuade readers into believing certain stances and actions while potentially ignoring other sides of the story(e.g.,the validity and effectiveness of certain trade actions).This study enriches critical metaphor analysis research in terms of discourse types and topics.It also inspires Chinese reporters to tell China’s stories in a good way and raises readers’ awareness of critical thinking during reading.