A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Sino-American News Discourses On Trade Friction

In early 2018,the US government promulgated a series of trade protection policies,leading to the escalation of trade frictions between China and the US,raising widely concerns about Sino-US economic and trade relations.In order to further understand the deep-seated ideology behind Sino-US trade frictions,standing on the shoulder of proximization theory and conceptual integration theory,the author chooses respectively 30 pieces of news discourses concerned with Sino-US trade frictions in2018 from the major authoritative media of China and the US with a time span of one year,analyzing them from the perspective of contrastive cognitive linguistics with quantitative and qualitative methods based on corpus techniques.The questions to be answered in the thesis include how to legalize one’s purpose by systematically and deliberately manipulating language under the model of proximization theory and how to use novel metaphors to construct a discourse image on the basis of conceptual integration model.The study finds that Chinese trade friction news(CTFN)discourses and American trade friction news(ATFN)discourses both regard themselves as the center of inside deictic center(IDC),while the other as outside deictic center(ODC).CTFN discourses employ more spatial proximization to accuse the US of economic aggression,while the ATFN discourses utilize more temporal proximziation to criticize China for unfair trade for a long time.In addition,the ATFN discourses adopt more axiological proximization to highlight its defense of national interests and legitimization of its actions.Both CTFN discourses and ATFN discourses employ novel metaphors to create positive images of themselves and negative image of the other side through the compression of vital relations of conceptual integration model,such as role-value,analogy,identity,disanalogy,cause-effect and change.