A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Chinese Web News Commentary

The studies of metaphor have been carried out from different perspectives for a long time. Traditionally, metaphor is regarded as a linguistic phenomenon only and is studied at the linguistic level from rhetoric, semantic and pragmatic perspectives respectively. With the publication of Metaphor We Live By, metaphor begins to be considered as a cognitive phenomenon based on the embodiment nature of our cognition. Recently, metaphor studies have undergone a socio-cognitive turn. The relationship between metaphor, ideology and socio-culture has attracted the attention of scholars from different fields. The major claim is that metaphor plays an important role in shaping the conceptualization of a speech or culture community and hence influences the underlying ideologies of the social members. In order to verify the claim, lots of scholars begin to illustrate it by the critical analysis of metaphors in real linguistic data. However, few conduct their studies in Chinese web news commentary.This study, guided by Charteris-Black’s CMA theory, is a critical metaphor analysis of Chinese web news commentary. It is conducted to answer the following research questions:(1) What are the conceptual metaphors used in Chinese web news commentary?(2) What are the functions of conceptual metaphors in Chinese web news commentary?(3)What are the ideologies realized by conceptual metaphors in Chinese web news commentary? In order to answer the above questions, metaphors in 60 People’s Web News Commentaries in 2014 are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively in this study. Firstly, the conceptual metaphors in the corpus are identified and classified by both the concordance tool Ant Conc3.2.1w and manual work. Then the roles played by those metaphors are explored in certain context. At last, the socio-cultural factors in China are taken into consideration in the metaphor analysis, which provides the insights into the ideologies of the mainstream Chinese media.Through analyzing the data, three findings are made: First, there are eleven major conceptual metaphors in the People’s Web News Commentary, namely LIVING ORGANISM metaphor, JOURNEY metaphor, BUILDING metaphor, WAR metaphor, NATURAL ENVIRONMENT metaphor, MACHINE metaphor, ART metaphor, SPORTS & GAMES metaphor, BUSINESS metaphor, FOOD metaphor and EXAMINATION metaphor. Second, those conceptual metaphors play an important role in enriching our language, organizing our conceptual systems and establishing our values and attitudinal tendency. The forementioned three functions of metaphor contribute to the formation of ideologies in Chinese web news commentary from linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic aspects. Third, different arrangements of metaphors demonstrate media’s different emotions and attitudes to the topics in the data and thus reflect the ideologies concealed in Chinese web news commentary. In the science and education web comments, BUILDING metaphor and BUISINESS metaphor are applied more frequently than in other web comments, indicating that science and education are the foundation for developing our country and the beneficial investment for the future of China. In the politics and economy web comments, machine is a conspicuous source domain. Our nation is conceptualized as a machine. With effective operation of all the systems, we can develop our country smoothly and quickly. And in the society and livelihood web comments, the frequently used WAR metaphor represents social problems as enemies so as to arouse our morale of fighting against those problems and reinforce the determination of our government to solve them. What’s more, ART metaphor and NATURAL ENVIRONMENT metaphor in the culture and entertainment web comments show that culture and entertainment play an important role not only in developing our own country but also in communicating with other countries and the equal and purified environment for culture and entertainment is valued much by Chinese people.