A Contrastive Analysis Of Metaphor In English And Chinese News Headlines

In the 1970s, metaphor became a hot issue around the world. Metaphor has been an important topic in cognitive linguistics since 1990s. In the past three decades, philosophers, psychologists and linguists began to admit that metaphor is an indispensable basis of language and thought; metaphor is a very prevalent linguistic phenomenon; metaphor is language's typical natural feature.Metaphor was once regarded as a kind of rhetoric, linguistic decoration and even the deviation from the normal use of language. By contrary, the cognitive linguists represented by Lakoff & Johnson argue that metaphor is not just a way of expressing ideas by means of language, but a way of thinking about things. Lakoff & Johnson put forward the concept which was named "conceptual metaphor", and they studied many conceptual metaphors existing in English such as ARGUMENT IS WAR etc. Foreign scholars have done a lot on the study of conceptual metaphor in the sight of cognition. In the past few years, there are many articles on conceptual metaphor, appearing in various journals or magazines, which were written by Chinese scholars from the perspective of cognition. However, most of them are constrained to introduce the theories abroad while independent study, especially the contrastive study based on some conceptual metaphors underlying English and Chinese, is still very little.When we read newspapers, we would take a look at the headlines at first. And we will choose some reports which we are interested in. Therefore, the news headline, in a way, determines whether a piece of news is successful. With the purpose of making the headline colorful, vivid, and attractive and eventually arousing the readers'interest, the editors usually apply abundant metaphors to headlines. The usage of metaphor could make the abstract concept more concrete; therefore, the readers would accept the news which has difficult expressions. The author adopted qualitative analysis through the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory. In order to gain all kinds of information abroad and at home, the thesis adopted the contrastive analysis of metaphors both in English and Chinese news headlines. To seek out the similarities and differences between them; meanwhile, we could gain better understanding of reading news.There are a large number of conceptual metaphors in news headlines. The findings of study reveal that the metaphorical concepts in the two languages are of great similarities according to the bodily experiences shared by human beings. Therefore, there are many different metaphorical expressions can formulate the same concept. In addition, this study further demonstrates the cognitive nature of metaphor, its universality and systematicity. This thesis could be helpful in the research of metaphor, and also these results would help people better understand western culture, and further enhance the cognitive ability of foreign language.