| Metaphor, an astonishingly widespread phenomenon in our life, plays a significantrole in our mind and language expression. There is a long history of metaphor study, fromthe very beginning of Poetics and Rhetoric, which were considered as Aristotle’s classics.Traditional rhetoric holds that metaphor is only a means of rhetoric, a kind of purelanguage phenomenon. However, with the development of cognitive science, the moderntheory of metaphor explicitly regards metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon, but for themeaning construction in the process of interpretation, it did not explore in depth.In this study, the author performs a careful investigation of metaphor in English newsheadlines focusing on Conceptual Integration Theory from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics. The source of corpus is News headlines in The Washington Post, The Times,and China Daily, which have a large circulation. This study explains the cognitivemechanism of the meaning construction of English news headlines based on ConceptualIntegration Theory, providing a new perspective for the study of news headlines. Based onConceptual Integration Theory, this study carries out a careful investigation on metaphor inEnglish news headlines. And qualitative and quantitative methods are cross-applied. Thestudy results show that metaphor in English news headlines is frequently employed, whichis caused by the cognitive characteristics of metaphor and the special role of newsheadlines. Besides, context, cultural background and personal cognitive ability playimportant parts in the process of meaning construction of metaphor. After the detailedanalysis of the latest corpus, the present study reveals the operation process behind thescenes of the meaning construction of metaphor in English news headlines and also offerssome implications to people to further understand metaphor in English news headlines. Meantime, the present study provides some suggestions and opinions for future study onmetaphor. |
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