| News fact, as its basic characteristic suggests, is independent of the subjective will. News reports, consequently, should reflect the whole nature of the facts. The mass media, mainstream media in particular, however, are endowed with political function, influencing people’s emotions and attitudes by information dissemination. In the era of information, the public obtains information from mass media, accepting the implied values in the new reports unconsciously. VOA News often claims to be neutral, objective and unbiased. The media, however, attempt to influence people’s attitudes and values by language with metaphors.Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson is a classic in the field of metaphor research. The device, an implied figure of speech, is not only a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in the daily life, but a widespread cognitive phenomenon as well. Cognitive linguistics treats metaphor as a thinking mode of perceiving and understanding the world. Since similarities are constructed by means of mapping mechanism, metaphors are conductive to relating the familiar to the unfamiliar, abstract and complicated. According to cognitive linguists, such as Lakoff and Johnson, human language is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, therefore, metaphors, as a means of understanding the world, could provide a new perspective to what is around us, and thus create new meanings. Different discourses are filled with metaphors, and economic discourse is of no exception.The thesis begins with a review of the history and status quo of metaphor research, including tradition view, pragmatic view and cognitive view. Then, the thesis expounds the theoretical values of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis. Critical Metaphor Analysis is a new and effective supplementary means of understanding more about the complicated relationship between language, thought and social context. CMA consists of three stages of metaphor analysis:metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. This approach applied to examine choices of metaphor could explore the relationships between metaphors, thoughts and social knowledge, revealing emotional and ideological intensions that motivate given metaphor choices.The current study is focused on metaphors in VOA (Voice Of America) economic news reports related to China, and VOA official website is selected as the data source. The author attempts to figure out the frequency of the metaphors in corpus and discuss the social background that influences metaphor use. From the analysis, we may find that the implication seems to represent standpoints and conform to the motives of the writer in terms of the cultural and ideological factors. Therefore, the author endeavors to propose a warning to arouse critical awareness in reading the "neutral, objective, or unbiased" claimed VOA news reports. |
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