A Comparative Study Of Metaphorical Representations In Chinese And American News Reports On High-speed Rail

Metaphor,as a linguistic phenomenon,has long been regarded as a rhetoric device or decorative language employed by poets.However,linguists,especially Lakoff and Johnson study metaphor from cognitive perspectives.They argue that metaphor is more than a figure of speech but a significant way of understanding the world since metaphor not only exists ubiquitously in language but also in thought and action.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory previous research on metaphor mainly identify and analyze conceptual metaphors in the discourses but rare study has delivered to interpret conventional and novel metaphors within the same discourse,therefore,draw upon the Mapping Theory and Blending Theory,the author developed a tentative analytical model to interpret conventional as well as novel metaphors emerged in news reports on HSR.The Mapping Theory brought forward by Lakoff and Johnson enables people to apprehend sophisticated and abstract concepts from simple as well as concrete concepts.The working mechanism of Mapping Theory is a mapping process between entities in the source domain and those in the target domain.But the unidirectional and fixed mapping process in metaphorical mapping fails to analyze elements that do not exist in the source domain.In 1997,the Blending Theory was put forward by Fouconnier and Turner,which took mental space as its basis.In a standard blending network,four mental spaces are involved,namely,input spaceI1 and I2,a generic space and a blend.Meaning construction within the Blending Theory is dynamic and flexible,which can be employed to explain novel metaphors that transcend Mapping Theory`s explanation.Therefore,this thesis combines the Mapping Theory and the Blending Theory to carry on the cognitive analysis of metaphor.Based on Mapping Theory and Blending Theory,the author introduced a theoretical framework.It involves four steps.The first step comes with identification of metaphorical expressions which are divided into two general categories of conventional as well as novel metaphor in the following step.Thirdly,different metaphors are interpreted within the Mapping Theory and the Blending Theory respectively.In this step,numerous sample sentences from the data are singles out to accompany the explanation.After that cross-cultural comparison is conducted to detect similarities and differences in the distribution of metaphors in two languages for further exploration of the reasons behind.The last step comes to draw insights from the empirical study.Adopting the method of quantitative and qualitative,conventional metaphors –HUMAN BEING,JOURNEY,GAMES,WAR,MACHINE and FOOD are indentified.Besides,novel metaphors including KONG FU in Chinese news reports and crusade and Manhattan project in American ones are elaborated on.Through the comparison of the shared metaphors and unique ones in Chinese and American news reports,reasons behind are revealed and the insight that conventional metaphors and novel metaphors subject to cultural universality and diversity are drawn.