| Metaphor has been the topic of haunting interest among scholars from diverse academic fields and formal and systematic studies on it can be traced back to Aristotle centuries before. In the traditional rhetorical view, metaphor is one of the rhetorical devices used for the effect of comparison or substitution and it is kind of abnormal language. During recent years, with the development of cognitive linguistics, studies on metaphor have shifted their focus from a strictly linguistic plane to a cognitive-based stance. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) put forward the cognitive approach to the study of metaphor in Metaphors We Live By, which is termed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). It argues that metaphor can constitute basic schemas by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. Therefore, metaphor plays a vital role in people's understanding of language and the world described through language. Since then, studies on conceptual metaphor have been flourishing, among which the Conceptual Integration Network Models (CINM) is prominent. It was advanced chiefly by Fauconnier and Turner in the 1990s and it penetrates into the inner mechanism of metaphor and explains how spaces in a metaphor blend to produce an emergent structure, which assists in comprehension of new information.However, a majority of the previous studies, if not all, confine themselves to the interpretation of metaphorical phenomenon between words or within sentences. Few have concentrated on metaphor's function in constructing coherence at discourse level. If any, they pay limited attention to metaphorical phenomenon in discourse from a macro-scopical perspective and do not take specific genres into consideration. Furthermore, plenty of research is carried out in the English context and there leaves room for cross-cultural studies. Based on this research background, the present study selects news discourse as its data sources and aims to address the following questions: 1) How do we identify metaphors in news discourse? 2) What roles do metaphors play in constructing coherent news discourse? What are the working mechanisms for metaphor in constructing coherence? 3) Are there similarities in metaphor's constructing coherence between Chinese and American news reports of one topic?A case study is made about the Beijing 2008 Olympics preparation reports. Enormous reports concerned are collected from People's Daily and the International Herald Tribune. Among them, ten Chinese samples with their ten English counterparts are selected for the sake of a comparative study. The present study resorts to CINM as its theoretical basis and proposes an analytic framework for interpreting the intra- and inter-relationships between metaphor, coherence and news discourse. A general overview is initially made after a browse of the large quantity of the data and then a detailed analysis is conducted on a Chinese sample and an English one (see Appendix II) on the premise of one topic.From the overview, a prevalent PERSON1 metaphor is decomposed into four sub-metaphors as evidenced by a large number of the news headlines and sample reports. In the subsequent analysis of the Chinese and English samples, the WAR and CONDUIT metaphors are deconstructed and it is found that they work similarly under the Double-scope Network Model to build a coherent preparation report. The CONDUIT metaphor entails a lot of CONTAINER metaphors. Apart from these conventional metaphors, some novel metaphors make their own contributions to a coherent preparation report, which makes a tiny difference between Chinese reports and English reports. In a word, coherence at discourse level is largely acquired by means of metaphor; nonetheless, these linguistic and cognitive factors do not exclude the social perspective of metaphor, coherence and news discourse. In fact, metaphor is an indispensable constituent of social policy in that most of the prestigious newspapers largely depend on metaphor to achieve their authority and objectivity.
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