Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In The Headlines Of Chinese And American News Reports On "Sino-japanese Conflicts"

Conceptual Metaphor Theory was first proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in theirmasterpiece Metaphors We Live By (1980). According to the theory, metaphor is cognitive innature, realized and comprehended through a cross-domain mapping. The essence ofconceptual metaphor is to understand one thing in terms of another. A conceptual metaphor iscomposed of source domain and target domain. The source domain refers to the concepts thatare concrete and easy to comprehend, and the target domain refers to concepts that areabstract and difficult to understand. Conceptual metaphor is comprehended through amapping process from source domain to target domain.Few scholars in China studies the conceptual metaphors in news headlines concerningpolitics and military, especially contrastive studies on Chinese and American headlinesconcerning conflicts between China and Japan. Therefore, this thesis tries to conduct acomparative study of conceptual metaphor employed in the headlines of Chinese andAmerican News reports on “Sino-Japanese Conflicts” since September,2012when theso-called Tokyo’s Purchasing Islands occurred, which is conducted within the framework ofthe Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) with reference to theexplanation on ideology and power in Critical Discourse Analysis. The primary aim of thisresearch is to analyze the application of conceptual metaphors in English news headlines, tofind out the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and Americannews headlines and analyze and elaborate on the reasons that lead to the similarities anddifferences, finally, to summarize the functions of conceptual metaphor in English newsheadlines.Three research questions are designed as follows:(1) What are the employments of the conceptual metaphors in headlines of Chinese andAmerican news reports on “Sino-Japanese Conflicts”?(2) What are the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors employed in headlinesof Chinese and American news reports on “Sino-Japanese Conflicts” and Why?(3) What are the functions of the conceptual metaphors employed in headlines of Chinese andAmerican news reports on “Sino-Japanese Conflicts”?All the news headlines analyzed in the thesis were collected from the websites of TIMEand China Daily. There was a series of conflicts and disputes occurred between China andJapan since September2012, including Diaoyu Island disputes, Japan’s Prime Minister Abevisiting Yasukuni Shrine, China’s air defense identification zone and the activities andmeasures taken by China, Japan and the U.S. Therefore, key words such as “Diaoyu Island”, “Yasukuni Shrine”,“Abe”,“air defense zone”, etc., were used to search the two websites forall the related news reports (“Senkaku” is also taken as a key word in the present research forthe sake of data integrity and objectivity). Time span of the data collected starts fromSeptember2012to January2014.98news headlines were collected from China Daily and98were from TIME, with repeated ones eliminated.Results were achieved based on data analysis and comparative study:(1) Conceptual metaphors were widely employed in news headlines. Among the98headlinesfrom China Daily,75were identified to employ conceptual metaphor, thus the proportionof conceptual metaphors among all the matched ones is76.5%. Among the98newsheadlines form TIME,73headlines were found to use conceptual metaphor, whichaccounts for74.5%. The most frequent ones were: container metaphor, human metaphor,war metaphor, clothes metaphor, game metaphor and UP/DOWN metaphor.(2) The employment of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American news reports sharessimilarities because human beings share similar brain structure and embodied experience,furthermore, the integration of different cultures also contribute to the similarities.However, differences also exist due to the different ideologies and political positions andculture difference.(3) Functions of conceptual metaphors in English news headlines are functions of persuasion,motivation, filter, simplification and bridge. Comparatively, function of simplificationtends to take the most frequent in Chinese data while functions of simplification and filterdo in American data.The thesis is of practical significance for English teaching and English learners to someextent. The thesis is devoted to contribute to conceptual metaphor studies in news headline tosome extent. In addition, the article could be regarded as helpful for readers to the ability ofindependent judgment and clearly realize the political positions and the hidden ideology in thenews headlines.