| Conceptual metaphor refers to that the conception system is produced and understood metaphorically. The essence of conceptual metaphor is to understand or experience one thing in terms of another. One conceptual metaphor is composed of two conceptual domains, the source domain and the target domain. The source domain involves the concepts that are concrete and easy to understand, while the target domain refers to the concepts that are abstract and hard to understand. The cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphor is a mapping process from the source domain to the target domain. This study tries to observe the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English news headlines and discuss the similarities and differences between them.The study has collected altogether665pieces of news headlines from two pieces of English newspapers, New York Times, Financial Times and two pieces of Chinese newspapers namely China Youth Daily and Global Times, in which204pieces of headlines are found with metaphors.Based on the analysis of the sample headlines, this study finds out that the cognitive mechanism of Chinese and English metaphorical news headlines share the following similarities:Firstly, Similar concepts in the source domain are mapped onto the target domain. Secondly, both metaphorical Chinese and English news headlines share the same concretization process; they are personification, animalization, hypostatization and alienation. Thirdly, the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphors in both Chinese and English news headlines is represented by the same three types of linguistic representations including conventional meaning, original meaning and novel meaning.However, this study has also observed that there are differences between them:Firstly, the structure of the source domain between Chinese and English metaphorical news headlines is different. Secondly, different relationship is produced in the mapping process. Thirdly, although both Chinese and English news headlines share the same three types of linguistic representations, there is difference.Document analysis, comparative method and case analysis are used for this study. The result of this study is helpful for Chinese and English learners to better understand the complicated metaphorical expressions in news headlines, so that we can help the learners to structure the mechanism of conceptual metaphors to understand and correctly express their ideas through relative approaches. One of the approaches is to lead the learners familiarize the basic elements of the source domain and target domain under the linguistic and cultural context which construct conceptual metaphors; the other approach is to guide the learners study and grasp the linguistic forms that contains whole or part of metaphoric elements to activate the mappings. In doing so, it thus provides writing guidance for them; besides, this study can also offer theoretical basis for further study to be carried out in journalistic English. |
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