A Pragmatic Investigation Into Metaphorization In English Newspaper Headlines

With speech act researching mode and relevance theory as the guideline, this thesis attempts to explore the phenomenon of metaphorization in English newspaper headlines as exposed in the corpus study. The main task is to build a theoretical model for processing metaphor with a pragmatic approach, which I hope will contribute to metaphor study. Chapter 1 introduces the subject of this study, metaphorization in newspaper headlines, and describes the organization of this thesis, together with its purpose and methodology.Chapter 2 is literature review. Current researching modes in news language ignore the communication process, leading to a dilemma for further studies. Due to its pragmatic nature, the speech act mode involves the communicator and the addressee in analyses, thus bringing prospects for relevant studies. The review on metaphor study centers around its definition. Drawing on various views, metaphor in this study is the result of interactions between two domains, which involves projection of features from the source domain to the target domain.Chapter 3 focuses on corpus construction and its findings. The study on 810 newspaper headlines from the New York Times, the Times and China Daily exposes three main findings: frequent application of metaphor in the corpus, different distribution of metaphorization in newspaper sections, and less frequent application of metaphor in China Daily.Chapter 4 is devoted to constructing a model of metaphorization in newspaper headlines, with the speech act mode as precondition and relevance theory as core framework. In this model, metaphor is the stimulus adopted by journalists to achieve optimal relevance in this ostensive communication, as well as the strategy to fulfill their writing purpose. Chapter 5 applies the theoretical model in explaining the three corpus findings, stressing the procedure of how metaphor operates in helping journalists present the news focus and attract readers' attention, thus attaining optimal relevance. Due to different writing purposes and readers' cognitive environments, the distribution of metaphor displays special features. Chapter 6 makes a summary of this study, and points out its significance in helping journalists grasp readers' cognition process and enriching relevance theory. The combination of pragmatic studies and corpus study contributes to the applied linguistic study on metaphor.