A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Chinese And American News Reports On The Belt And Road Initiative

The Belt and Road initiative(Hereinafter referred to as the BRI)is a complex,comprehensive and diversified economic framework.It not only runs across the continents of Asia and Europe and involves dozens of countries along the route,but also involves many fields such as politics,economy and culture.Since the BRI was put forward,it has been highly concerned by the international community and the mainstream media,home and abroad,which scrambled to report it and discussed its connotations enthusiastically.Then,how does the U.S.with the strongest voice in the world think of the initiative? Whether is American media’s view different from Chinese? In view of this,the thesis intends to use the Critical Metaphor Analysis to comparatively study the conceptual metaphors existing in the two countries’ news reports on the BRI,aiming to analyze the different views and opinions of the two countries about the BRI and then to reveal the hidden ideologies behind the two countries.Besides,by Critical Metaphor Analysis,it can be allowed to explore the factors that cause different views and opinions from political,economic and cultural perspectives.The data was selected from Washington Post,New York Times and China Daily(English edition),and the time span for news reports starts from 2013 to 2017.The research comes to the following findings: 1.There are three common conceptual metaphors existing in Chinese and American corpus: war metaphor,journey metaphor and construction metaphor with different frequencies.2.The different uses of metaphor in the two corpora mainly result from different target domains mapped from the same source domain.3.The same kind of conceptual metaphors have different focuses: Chinese media encourages people to participate in and to make efforts to implement the initiative;while American media focuses on the challenges that the BRI may arise.4.Most of the conceptual metaphor plays a persuasive function with different purposes: Chinese media aims to persuade other countries that the BRI is beneficial for them to be prosperous and every relevant country should take part in it.But American media aims to persuade other countries not to take part in it because the BRI is just a way for China to be a hegemony in the future.