Contrastive Analysis Of Anti-corruption Discourses In Chinese And Western Media

The thesis intends to make a critical cognitive analysis of anti-corruption discourses in Chinese and western media from the perspective of Proximization Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis.By incorporating metaphorization elements with proximization model,our aim is to develop an integrated theoretical framework to see the way Critical Metaphor Analysis is offered to contribute to the IDC(inside-the-deictic-center)-ODC(outside-the-deictic-center)demarcation of proximization model,enhance fear appeal and axiological conflict in the proximization process,thus working to realize and intensify proximization.Using anti-corruption news reports of Chinese and western media as linguistic data to build two corpora for the research,we address diverging language strategies employed to construe one and the same event,China's anti-corruption campaign,and their hidden epistemic stance-taking and ideologies of Chinese and western media in a contrastive approach via lexico-grammatical resources.We find that Chinese media employs more temporal proximization strategies to legitimize the continuity of the long-term anti-corruption policy and more positive axiological proxmization strategies to strengthen the credibility and confidence of the people in the Party and government,while the western media adopts more spatial proximization strategies to enhance magnitude of China's corruption and more negative axiological proximization strategies to intentionally delegitimize the effectiveness of China's anti-corruption policy.In metaphor analysis,the Chinese media enhances the continuity of anti-corruption policy with positive attitude in war metaphors and journey metaphors and the determination to tackle problems for the building of a clean government in disease metaphors and building metaphors,cooperating with the temporal and positive axiological proximization strategies.The western media steers attacking target to Chinese political system in plant metaphors,disease metaphors and building metaphors,intensifying the negative ideological construal on its axiological axis.Consequently,Critical Metaphor Analysis can coordinately work with Proximization Theory to enrich analysis to metaphorical expression terrain and further validates related findings within proximization model.