A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Time’s Reports On Chinese Human Rights

Metaphor is a tool for people to perceive and understand unfamiliar experiences and things by using familiar experiences and things. A large number of metaphors in news reports make news reports more vivid and easier to be understood by readers. Since “Critical metaphor analysis”(CMA) was put forward in 2004 by Charteris-Black, an increasing amount of studies have been done of metaphors in news reports from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. However, the study of human rights metaphors in news reports from critical discourse perspective is scant, let alone researches on Chinese human rights metaphors.This study mainly adopts CMA to analyze Chinese human rights metaphors in Time’s reports, and then to probe into its functions and ideologies by three stages of metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. By the selection of Time’s 50 published articles about “Chinese human rights” as the corpus, ranging from June 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014, in the hope of answering the following three questions: 1) What are the main types of Chinese human rights metaphors in Time’s reports? 2) What are the functions of Chinese human rights metaphors in Time’s reports? 3) What ideologies do Chinese human rights metaphors implied in Time’s reports?The findings of this thesis include: firstly, this study figures out seven types of conceptual metaphors which includes war metaphor, body metaphor, nature metaphor, animal metaphor, light/darkness metaphor, building metaphor and journey metaphor, and war metaphor takes the highest proportion. Secondly, there are three functions of Chinese human rights metaphors in Time’s reports. From the angle of evaluative functions, this thesis shows that Time treats Chinese human rights in a negative way, as well as the minimum percentage of positive attitude; from the perspective of social function, Chinese human rights metaphors convey the true intention in the establishment of intimate relationship; from the view of political function, Chinese human rights metaphors present that the media is maintaining and guiding political tendency in the news reports. What’s more, under the guidance of hidden ideologies, Chinese human rights metaphors in Time’s reports embody prejudice on Chinese human rights, self-centered moral orientation, values of western freedom and cultural hegemony.On the basis of analyzing Time’s reports on Chinese human rights, this thesis explores the inherent features of metaphors in Time’s reports on Chinese human rights discourse, and enriches research dimension of critical metaphor analysis. Meanwhile, the domination of discourse power of news media discloses that they control and convey their ideologies in reports.