| As an indispensable part of cognitive linguistics,conceptual metaphor,the concept of which developed and promoted by Lakoff and Johnson,is pervasive in everyday life for it is a way of people’s thinking pattern.The essence of it is to know and understand abstract domains in terms of domains which are familiar and more concrete to people.In 2004,Lakoff gave his definition of frame in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate that frame is mental structures that shape the way people see the world,and pointed out that the two domains in conceptual metaphor are actually correspond to two frames.The connection between conceptual metaphor and frame is that: a metaphorical frame can be activated by a metaphorical word,while conceptual metaphors are constructed by the mappings between two frames.Studies of conceptual metaphors on different discourses are popular these days,especially on economic news not only for they are usually close to people’s life but also for containing economic terms abstract to understand.This thesis is a comparative study of conceptual metaphors using news reports from American News Corpus(ANC)and Chinese News Corpus(CNC)about trade war from the perspective of framing theory,aiming to explore conceptual metaphors used and the attitudes behind.Seventy pieces of news reports from CNC and fifty from ANC are collected within the timeline ranging from March 22,2018 to October 31,2020.The former has 59724 total words while the latter 61634.With the help of Wmatrix,a corpus tool,target domains and target words are identified.The work of identification of conceptual metaphors afterwards is done with the assistance of MIPVU.The combination of qualitative method and quantitative method ensures the accuracy and validity of this study.This thesis intends to answer the following questions:(1)Which kinds of conceptual metaphors are used in economic news reports about Sino-US trade war in CNC and ANC? And what are the most commonly and typically used ones?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of conceptual metaphors and frames identified between CNC and ANC?(3)What are attitudes or values carried from the images constructed in these reports?The results of this research can be given after the data have been integrated and processed.The research has found out that conceptual metaphors and frames widely exist in reports collected from CNC and ANC: the former contains 2004 word tokens and 1030 conceptual metaphors while the latter contains 1909 word tokens and 1173 conceptual metaphors.The most frequently used conceptual metaphors identified from these two corpora include the war metaphor,the human being metaphor,the journey metaphor,the sports metaphor,the object metaphor,the container metaphor,the up/down metaphor and the machine metaphor.The similarities and differences in the use of conceptual metaphors and frames are clear on the analysis of the data.It could be noticed that same metaphors exist in two corpora,such as war metaphor,up/down metaphor.The similarity in the use of metaphors reveals that general traits of human thinking can be reflected by metaphors and that there exist the possibility that people may share the same understanding to metaphors for the common cognitive experience.The difference lies in the different use of metaphorical words even in one metaphor.Different metaphorical words are able to create distinct frames so as to create the specific structures of a country which the other party want to create.Conceptual metaphors reflects people’s thinking pattern,while the metaphorical words,which both frame the surface frame and deep frame,reveal the attitudes and values behind.The implications of this study can be concluded as below.First,considering the attitudes and values hidden behind language,it is necessary to be a critical reader when reading economic reports.Second,by explaining the mapping mechanism of conceptual metaphor,this study helps readers to have a better understanding to the abstract concepts in economic discourses. |
PDF Full Text Request