A Contrastive Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Chinese And American Disease Reports

Metaphor is not only the ordinary language but also a basic way of thinking for human beings---conceptual metaphor. It is pervasive in various discourse domains not just in literature or political speeches. Ever since the advent of the conceptual metaphor theory, there has been an ascending interest in metaphors and an increase in metaphor studies. One of the new developments is Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA) in critical discourse analysis. CMA asserts that metaphor is not only linguistic and cognitive but also pragmatic and shall be studied from these three aspects. However, the review indicates that studies of metaphor from the perspective of CMA are confined to discourses in politics, speeches, and economics. Health, as an increasingly hotly-discussed topic, is being examined more often. Diseases, especially the incurable that threatens human beings? health the most, such as cancer, are usually unknown to patients and their family members and as a result often talked about metaphorically.The study attempts to analyze the uses of metaphors in Chinese and American disease reports within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis. To ensure the comparability between the two kinds of reports, only cancer reports released in CNN website and Xinhua Net in 2015 are chosen as the data for study. By analyzing the metaphorical expressions in the Chinese and American cancer reports, this study attempts to identify and interpret the dominant conceptual metaphors. In addition, motivations for uses of metaphors are analyzed as well. The research questions are:(1) what conceptual metaphors prevail in Chinese and American cancer reports?(2) what factors motivate the similarities and/or differences in the uses of metaphor in Chinese and American cancer reports?In the study, quantitative research methods and qualitative research methods are both employed. For quantitative research, the software Wordsmith 4.0 is used to identify the dominant conceptual metaphors to be analyzed and interpret the highlights in conceptual metaphors. For the qualitative research, the three-stage metaphor research procedure proposed by Black, metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation, and metaphor explanation, is adopted to conduct a more comprehensive metaphor study, and the five-step metaphor identification procedure proposed by Steen is employed to identify metaphorical expressions and corresponding conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American cancer reports. The study results show that:(1) metaphors are extensively used in Chinese and American cancer reports;(2) some conceptual metaphors are common(such as topography metaphor and plant metaphor), some are similar(such as journey metaphor and conflict metaphor), and some others are different(such as religion metaphor and universe metaphor) in Chinese and American cancer reports;(3) experiential homogeneity, different values, and different beliefs motivate the similar and different metaphor uses in Chinese and American cancer reports.This study, on the one hand, innovates and develops, to a certain extent, the methodology for contemporary metaphor studies, and on the other hand, expands the discourse types of CMA studies. However, this study focuses on the metaphors in which the disease is the target domain rather than metaphors where the disease is the source domain, resulting in a marked deficiency in terms of systematicity and comprehensiveness. Hence, further researches are required and necessary.