| The study of metaphors witnesses a long history, which can be traced back to the time of Aristotle. However, metaphor study has been traditionally confined to the field of rhetoric and that of language. The publication in1980of Lakoff and Johnson’s work Metaphors We Live By marks the establishment of the cognitive approach to metaphor, which is recognized as a great breakthrough in the field of metaphor study. They defining metaphor as a basic human way of thinking pervasive in ordinary life, the study on metaphor extends from the realm of literary works to many fields. A large number of the studies focus on the use of metaphors in news discourse, which include numerous terminologies and abstract concepts. However, few people have compared metaphors found in English campus news discourse with those in Chinese news discourse as a whole. With the information era coming and development of internet, universities pay much more attention to propaganda through campus news in which there are a lot of metaphors on their website.Since conceptual metaphor is closely based on our physical and cultural experience, it follows that different cultures may have different interpretations of conceptual metaphor. Following Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive theory, the present thesis aims to extend the contemporary study of metaphor to the analysis of Chinese and English campus news discourses. The data collected from campus news on two famous University website-Cambridge and Peking University. Adopting quantitative, qualitative and contrastive analysis methods, some tentative research findings have been discovered in this thesis:1) This study testifies the universality of Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory. From the data collected,97metaphorical expressions are found in Chinese data while the number of metaphorical expressions in English data is94, conceptual metaphors are widely used in Chinese data as well as in English data.2) Conceptual metaphors appearing in the corpus are categorized into ten different kinds in which war, journey, building, human metaphors occur in the two data. The result of this study provides evidence for cultural coherence for conceptual metaphors.3) Some culture specific conceptual metaphors can be found in the data such as family metaphors, drama metaphors and plant metaphors in Chinese data and container metaphors, orientational metaphors and money metaphors in English data. These differences can be attributed to cultural factors which constitute the basis of conceptual metaphors.To sum up, Chinese and English share some same conceptual metaphors; however, there are still differences. The similarity is mainly due to common physical experience and perception of the world and the differences lie in the respective cultural specifications.This study has both theoretical significance and practical significance. It makes development and further advancement in conceptual metaphor theory and enriches the comparative study of conceptual metaphors. Besides, it is helpful to intercultural communications between English and Chinese students. Making contrast on conceptual metaphors in different cultures can be beneficial to English learners and Chinese learners as well as editors a lot.This comparative study of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese campus news discourse in only a preliminary attempt of research, it calls for a more thorough study from many different dimensions. |
PDF Full Text Request