The Contrastive Study Of Newspaper Headline Metaphors Between English And Chinese-From The Perspective Of Culture

In news report, the journalists adopt metaphors frequently. As we know, headline is the "eye" of news. With the purpose of making the headline language colorful, vivid, attractive and eventually arousing the readers' interest, the editors usually apply abundant metaphors to headlines. Language is the carrier of culture; therefore, there must be a profound culture behind the headline metaphors.From the perspective of culture, the author tries to make a contrastive study between English and Chinese headline metaphors, to find their similarities and differences, furthermore, to explore their cultural sources respectively. With the combined approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis, and the means of corpus as well, this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the criterions of English and Chinese headline metaphors. After a general research, it points out some characteristics of headline metaphors with the help of the specific examples.The findings of the study are as follows: (1) In English newspaper headlines, the metaphors that appear with high frequency are business metaphors and sports metaphors. Because of the long history of business civilization of western countries, business metaphors are vividly reflected in English. For example, bargain for something, give one's two cents and so on. Besides, "fair play" is one of the basic values of American people, it is the sports such as football, baseball and boxing that reflects this value. Meanwhile, sports metaphors have come into other areas such as politics, education and daily life. For example, cover all the bases, hit below the belt and so on. In Chinese newspaper headlines, the metaphors that appear frequently are mainly eating/food metaphors and family metaphors. For thousands of years, Chinese people have a deep feeling of family, and they even regard the society as an extended family. For example, fumu guan (father and mother official), people of all ethnic groups are tongbao (fellow citizens). In addition, "food is the first necessity for human beings", therefore, eating/food means much more than just keeping alive. Undoubtedly, there must be lots of food metaphors in Chinese. For example, chi baizhang (eat a defeat), chi dingxinwan (to eat a mind-easing pill), xiang bobo (to be popular). (2) Culturally influential metaphors (mainly English to Chinese) appearing in newspaper headlines. These metaphors are mainly from allusions and historical events. With the close communication between western countries and China, many literary works are quite familiar to Chinese people, such as Don Quixote, Cinderella and so on. Some metaphors from historical events are known to almost every one, such as Waterloo. (3) Culturally specific metaphors appearing frequently in English and Chinese newspaper headlines. In western countries, especially America, the rate of car possession ranks the first place. So there are large numbers of car metaphors in English. For example, back-seat driver, crank up and so on. Besides, Beijing opera takes an important role in Chinese tradition culture; therefore, there are lots of opera metaphors in Chinese. For example, chang bailian (to play the bad guy), chang duitai xi (to take an opposite position against a person or to oppose someone on an issue). Furthermore, the author makes a comparison between English and Chinese about these headline metaphors, and analyzes their cultural background.In newspaper headlines, with the purpose of attracting readers, large numbers of metaphors with cultural characteristics are adopted. Some related statistics are calculated in chapter 1 of this thesis. What's more, a brief summary of headline metaphor translation is also introduced, with the hope of making some attribution to news communication between English and Chinese.The founding is helpful for the further study of newspaper headlines, and it also has some values of reference for news communication between English and Chinese. As an experiment of headline metaphor study, this thesis needs to be further studied both in breadth and depth. Because of the limited length of this thesis, only the frequently appeared metaphors are selected in the study, the metaphors with lower frequency are not included. In addition, further study can be carried out to make a more specific study of news report: politics, economics, daily life, entertainment, sports and the like. And then, headline metaphor will be bound to attract more attention and arouse more discussions, and it will be helpful for the news headline study. This is also the direction for the author in the future studies.