| Metaphor, a prevailing language phenomenon, is influential because it persuades people of certain ways of viewing the world. It has long been viewed as a rhetoric device of language until Lakoff and Johnson's masterpiece---Metaphors we live by was published. In this book, they propose a cognitive theory of metaphor, which regards metaphor as a matter of thought. Since then the study on metaphor has been applied in multidisciplinary domains and has brought lots of fruits. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) proposed by Jonathan Charteris-Black (2004) is one of them. CMA, as he claims, reveals the covert (and possibly unconscious) intentions of language users and stresses the rhetorical and ideological value of metaphors in discourse.Among all the domestic Chinese and English comparative studies of metaphor, few of them are corpus-based. This paper adopts Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual theory as the basic theoretical framework and Charteris-Black's Critical Metaphor Analysis as the analytical model. In view of this, the author selected 110 related reports on climate negotiations from 2009 Copenhagen Accord to 2010 Cancun summit as the subjects of this research and built up two mini corpora---Chinese and American news corpora. The frequency and collocations of metaphor keywords are investigated in both corpora. Since this research aims to find out how Chinese and American media persuade their readers by employing metaphors, the background information will also be probed.A large number of similar metaphors are identified in Chinese and American corpora. They are ethics metaphors, war metaphors, journey metaphors, building metaphors, sports metaphors and crime metaphors, etc. Among them, ethics metaphors, war metaphors, journey metaphors are at high frequency. They can be conceptualized as:CLIMATE ACCORD IS ETHICS; CLIMATE NEGOTIATION IS WAR/CONFLICT; CLIMATE NEGOTIATION IS A LONG ROUGH JOURNEY. In Chinese reports, ethics metaphors are used most commonly. They can be interpreted as "Climate negotiation should be fair; China is a responsible country and it is willing to fulfill its commitments on reducing greenhouse emission." However, in American reports, journey metaphors are employed at the highest frequency. For them, "Climate negotiation is a long rough journey; there are obstacles and blocks on the road; the U.S. government could not make any commitments." Judging from this analysis, we can see the choice of metaphors and the meaning they convey are different in terms of the cultural and ideological factors.Therefore, the author puts forward a proposal of raising people's critical awareness in reading news reports. |
