A Metaphor Model Study In English Science News: Gravitational Wave As A Case

Gravitational wave was successfully detected in February 2016.And the global media scrambles to report the great triumph in astronomy.This research catches the tide to analyze the pervasive metaphors in natural science.The corpus is a collection of 50 science news related to gravitational wave selected from three mainstream western media websites,that is,BBC News,Science New and Science Daily.All the metaphors about this discovery are identified under the guiding principles of Metaphor Identification Procedure(Pragglejaze Group,2007).Specifically,there are 2111 metaphors being sifted out from the sample with the density ranging from 20 to 60 metaphors per thousand words.And the average metaphor density in science news is 49.91‰,approximately equals 50 metaphors per thousand words.The results support the idea that metaphor is widespread in everyday life(Lakoff,1980,p.3),and natural science is not an exception.A new theoretical framework,i.e.metaphor tree model,is introduced and established to discover the relation between these various metaphors,which is composed of a root metaphor,a set of branch metaphors and a large number of leaf metaphors.In particular,the root metaphor is the underlying conceptual metaphor;the branch metaphoris represented by the base form(without inflection or derivation)of words or phrases which can be metaphorically used;and every leaf metaphor means the language user has called the word or phrase once.In addition,the metaphor tree model is applied to tidy the data from corpus-based analysis.Metaphor trees with precise amount of branches and leaves have been established for the top nine frequent root metaphors.The results prove that numerous metaphorical expressions are not divergent and randomly chosen,but converge to a relatively small amount of conceptual metaphors.Moreover,the power of metaphor in science is explored in this thesis from three perspectives,that is,to reframe the recondite scientific knowledge,to facilitate the iteration of scientific development,and to render a coherent discourse with interrelated metaphor trees.