| Recent years have witnessed a bunch of disaster news in China, which always receive highly attention among people around the world, so that has been what the media compete to cover. Many related studies have showed that news reports are influenced by the underlying values and beliefs of the producer and media of different countries always show different attitudes and positions to the same event.Since language reflects and affects people's mind, metaphorical expressions are decided and controlled by some mental process, which can, to some extent, reflect people's attitudes towards the surrounding world. This thesis analyzes the choosing and using of metaphors with the help of critical metaphor analysis(CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black in 2004, in order to reveal the relationship between metaphor, cognition and social knowledge, and furtherly disclose the underlying attitudes, values and ideology. This study selects 25 pieces of Chinese and American news reports on Tianjin “8·12” explosion accident, and constructs both Chinese and English corpus for the analysis.Through the thorough analysis and contrastive research of the conceptual metaphors, the following major findings are obtained:First, the thesis testifies the basic ideas of conceptual metaphor theory: conceptual metaphor broadly exists in disaster news discourse; conceptual metaphor is systematic, thus mappings in certain frames of conceptual metaphor can be conducted.Second, the frequent occurrence of a conceptual metaphor can make the readers accept the underlying biased ideologies, considering the viewpoints of the article to be “truth”.Third, through the contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphor employed in the Chinese and American news reports, the thesis finds that the media always highlights or hides some ideas or facts by means of conceptual metaphor. Even one same metaphor may brings different effects for serving the national interests. For instance, in the reports of Xinhua net, the source domain “victory in the war” is mapped onto the target domain “success in the disaster relief work”. While in the reports of CNN, the same source domain is mapped onto the tar get domain “timely aid to the disaster area”. |
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