Inducing Cultural Metaphor From The Internet News Of USA Today: A Tentative Study

There are several ways in which to study national cultures including reviewing a nation's literature and art, ethnography, and cross-cultural surveys either of values such as individualism and assertiveness or of cultural orientations toward phenomena such as time and space. This thesis describes a new grounded method, the cultural metaphor, for analyzing national cultures. A cultural metaphor is a unique or very distinctive institution, phenomenon, or activity of a nation's culture that most or all of its citizens consider to be very important and with which they identify closely. The popularly existing dimensional approach to culture study forces comparisons between national cultures but does not provide a thick description, thus is called extremely useful but incomplete. Therefore, a grounded cultural metaphor designed serves as a supplement to, and sometimes as an alternative to, the dimensional approach. The current research method of cultural metaphor termed the grounded theory method is an emic or culture-specific approach. A grounded theory is one that is inductively derived from the study of the phenomenon it represents. That is, it is discovered, developed, and provisionally verified through systematic data collection and analysis of data pertaining to that phenomenon. Based on this theory, 100 articles from the internet news of one important American newspaper, the USA Today, are collected as the corpus of the study. Instead of beginning with a theory and then proving it, the study begins with study of the corpus, and what is relevant to that corpus is allowed to emerge. By classifying the 100 pieces of news in July and August of 2003, it is found that the main focus of the media during that time is security issues such as terrorism and the Iraqi War. To metaphorically illustrate in a more specific way, several aspects of contemporary American culture reflected by the 100-article corpus are studied including terrorism, war, sex, multiculturalism, and music. Although they are just a part of American culture, the study still gives us a brief but objective review of contemporary American society. In order to identify certain cultural metaphors at the national level, the author explored a large number of other materials concerning the cultural phenomena conveyed by the corpus and two cultural metaphors of America were identified and illustrated. Football games and rock concerts as the two cultural metaphors identified respectively present and validate the two American success models – the traditional success model and the creative success model. Due to the specific social background reflected by the 100-article corpus of this study, security is predicted to be a cultural metaphor ever since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.