| Media discourse plays a significant role in our lives and is a popular topic of study in linguistics.The COVID-19 pandemic,as an urgent global public health event,has been extensively covered by various media outlets.Exploring media discourse from the perspective of conceptual metaphor is of great importance for accurately understanding media discourse and advancing the development of conceptual metaphor theory.To investigate the functions and meanings of conceptual metaphors in media discourse,a self-compiled corpus was utilized in this study.The corpus comprises of30 news reports,randomly selected over a three-year period from 2020 to 2022.These reports were exclusively obtained from the China Daily English Edition,focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.This study employed a semi-automated annotation scheme,wherein Wmatrix was utilized for automatic semantic annotation to identify potential metaphorical expressions.Additionally,a novel annotation framework,as proposed by Shutova,Devereux,and Korhonen(2013),was employed for manual annotation to discern conceptual metaphors,which were subsequently classified using Conceptual Metaphor Theory.Finally,the functions inherent in the construction of epidemic prevention concepts were explored by analyzing the work mechanisms,types,and distributional characteristics of conceptual metaphors within media discourse.The results of this study suggest a substantial utilization of conceptual metaphors in media discourse,with Human,Container,War,Journey,and Machine metaphors being the most frequently employed,in decreasing order of frequency;these conceptual metaphors predominantly serve informative,emotive,and performative functions in constructing epidemic prevention concepts.Furthermore,this study underscores the ubiquitous nature of conceptual metaphors and provides valuable perspectives for the analysis of media discourse surrounding epidemic-related topics. |
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