A Comparative Analysis On Ebola News Reports From Critical Metaphor Analysis Perspective

The study collects Ebola-related news source data from China Daily,The Washington Post and South Africa News 24 spanning from June 2014 to September 2014 with 75 articles in total and then builds up corpora with the aim to reveal the relationship between metaphors and ideology.Corpus-based analysis software AntConc 3.2.4 is used to make quantitative and qualitative comparison of the identified metaphors.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,the study adopts Corpus-based Critical Metaphor Analysis Theory proposed by Charteris-Black as the theoretical framework.Through metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation,the present study explores the working mechanism,characteristics and functions of the metaphors in Ebola discourse.From the selected Ebola-related news reports,five major conceptual metaphors are identified in the study,namely,War Metaphors,Criminal Metaphor,Obstacle Metaphor,Religion Metaphor and Drama Metaphor.Further analyses come to examples and the mappings of the metaphors from Source Domain to Target Domain,the political,cultural and historical backgrounds of the metaphor usages,and the discursive purposes of the metaphors.Finally,the study goes deep to the medical workers',the patients' and nations'images construction via metaphors and looks forward to the importance of the reconstruction of Africa's positive image and the significance of metaphoric-free view on illness reports proposed by Sontag.Based on the critical metaphor analysis of the news,the findings can be summarized as follows:Firstly,the same type of metaphor has different implications in different corpora due to the diversified cultural backgrounds.For example,Religion Metaphor has its distinct features and implied meaning in Chinese and American cultures.Secondly,the most frequently used and important metaphor in the disease discourse is War Metaphor,which can raise alerting awareness and prompt preventive behavior among social members but causing unnecessary panic at the same time.Thirdly,Violence Metaphor is usually adopted in the beginning and middle period of the disease outbreak,which is War Metaphor and Criminal Metaphor in the study.Fourthly,the subjects' images are diversified and interpenetrated,among which the medical workers are described as heroes and the patients possess dual identities since their bodies have infectious virus.Fifthly,China',America's and Africa's images construction implied in Drama Metaphor reveals different national image pursuits.Africa is depicted as "the helped",China"peacekeeper" and America "the leader".These images are influenced by historical,cultural and political factors.Lastly,the reconstruction of Africa's positive image and metaphoric-free view on illness discourse have great practical and theoretical significance.The study,through critical metaphor analysis of the Ebola-related news,is helpful in enhancing the readers' critical awareness towards illness discourse,improving the metaphor framework in illness reports for journalists and enlightening reports of other public health emergencies.