A Comparative Study Of Ideological Function Of Metapher In Domestic And Foreign Press Reports On Environmental Issues In China

In recent years, lots of studies have been done concerning ideological function of metaphor in discourse, especially in the field of political discourse and economic discourse. However, only a few studies have paid attention to ideological function of metaphor in environmental discourse, and fewer by the means of comparative study. By combining corpus linguistics approach, this study tries to answer the following two questions based on Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis:1) what are the similarities and differences between Chinese media and Western media in choosing metaphor?2) how does metaphor convey ideology through these similarities and differences? After comparing and analyzing the data, it is found that "JOURNEY" metaphor and "WAR" metaphor are frequently used in both Chinese media and Western media. Chinese media prefers using "PHYSICAL HEALTH" metaphor to present the Chinese government’s determination to deal with pollution while Western media tends to use "NATURAL PHENOMENON" metaphor to stress the seriousness of the environmental problems in China and how angry the public is. Moreover,"BUILDING" metaphor can only be found in Chinese media, which may result from Chinese culture and national situation. Finally, this study points out that the analysis of cognitive perspective of metaphor alone cannot fully reveal ideological function of metaphor. It needs to put the metaphorical expressions back into discourse to explore contextual, cultural, social and political factors.