An Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphor In English Disease News Reports

Metaphor is first proposed as a rhetorical terminology in the West.With the avalanches of linguistic researches,especially after the publication of Metaphors We Live By co-written by Lakoff and Johnson,the study of metaphor is subsumed in the field of cognitive research.Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory becomes another milestone in the metaphor study.In 2014,the outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in West Africa aroused wide concern around the world.The news reports are the first-hand information about the infected areas,which plays an important role in message dissemination.Conceptual metaphor can make abstract and unfamiliar images more specific,which is an important way to enrich the expressive power of the media.But so far,there is little researches on how conceptual metaphors are used in the disease discourses,since most of the studies focus on economic and political discourses.Under the guidance of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),this study analyzes the news reports of the Ebola virus disease,and tries to answer the following two questions:(1)What types of conceptual metaphors are employed in the disease news reports?(2)What are the functions of the conceptual metaphors employed in the disease news reports?In order to answer the questions,32 news reports about Ebola hemorrhagic fever from March 1st to November 30 th in 2014 in TIME and Washington Post are selected.In the process of analysis,quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,description and interpretation are used to identify,classify,calculate and analyze the metaphorical expressions in the discourse.The Ant Conc software is used to ensure the accuracy of data calculation.The main findings are as follows:First,there are a large number of metaphorical expressions in the collected news reports,and most of them belong to ontological metaphor,which account for 55.6%,more than half of the total number.Structural metaphor and orientational metaphor account for 34.6 and 9.8% respectively.In the ontological metaphor,human metaphor and container metaphor almost occupy the same proportion.They are 42.5% and 35.8%.In the structural metaphor,war metaphor and journey metaphor account for 49% and 25.3% which are larger than others.As for the orientational metaphor,MORE IS UP appears the highest frequency.Second,the metaphorical expressions have the function of coherence,motivation and simplification.The systematicity in a single metaphor and the entailments between two aspects of a single concept play great roles in achieving the coherence of discourse.Through rendering the cruelty of the Ebola hemorrhagic fever,human metaphor and war metaphor effectively stimulate and arouse the readers' determination and will to fight.Machine metaphor,building metaphor and other structural metaphors realize the function of helping people to understand the complexity of disease,while container metaphor regards abstract things as bounded container which also realizes this function well.This study also enrich the scope of the application of conceptual metaphor on the basis of the further confirmation of the pervasiveness and systematicity features of metaphor.Conceptual metaphor is not only a kind of language phenomenon,but also a kind of human thinking and cognition.This study also helps people better understand the disease news reports,and improve people's ability to analyze and appreciate them at the same time.