A Critical Metaphorical Study Of Discourse On Employment Of Chinese College Students

For over two thousand years in history,metaphor research was conducted from the aspect of rhetorical function.This traditional view holds that metaphor itself is just a matter of extraordinary words,rhetorical in nature and independent of human cognition.However,the past three decades have witnessed a series of radical changes in the study on metaphors,and a breakthrough appeared when Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live by(1980),in which they originally looked at metaphor from the cognitive perspective.Besides,the Conceptual Metaphor Theory they put forward has laid the foundation for a great deal of later research.Within the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis adopts a diachronic research to explore the features of metaphor usage in discourses on employment of Chinese college students.The study coves a time span of about 30 years,which is divided into three periods,namely,1980 s,1990s and the present period.Accordingly,for each period the author collected eight news reports on employment of Chinese college students,and sorted into three small corpora,which are respectively named as Corpus?,Corpus ? and Corpus ?.While Critical Metaphor Analysis is applied to find out main metaphor categories and to interpret dominant conceptual metaphors in each corpus,the author then takes a contrastive approach to compare the main conceptual metaphors across each corpus,aiming at uncovering the similarities and differences of metaphor usage in different periods.In accord with the research questions,the conceptual metaphors of the dominant metaphor categories in each corpus are generalized.Then,through comparison of those dominant metaphors in each corpus,the study finds that the three corpora share two source domains,namely,STRUGGLING and JOURNEY,but the target domains are different.Besides,there are some other differences,including opposite connotations of“??”(rice bowls)in Corpus?and Corpus?,different sources of SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP in Corpus?and Corpus?,as well as differences in target domains of WATER metaphor in Corpus?and Corpus?.Finally,the author finds that differences exist in general attitudes behind metaphors towards employment of college students in different periods.In 1980s,the government would assign jobs to college graduates,so it's considered that they may have no worry about employment,despite lack of agency.While 1990s is regarded as a transitional period from 1980s to the present period,in that although the college graduates probably no longer get stable jobs from the government,they are faced with various opportunities and challenges in the market economy.As for the present period,it's commonly held that intense competition exists and the college graduates have to spare no efforts to find a job.