A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In The Sino-US Trade War News From The Wall Street Journal In Light Of The Framing Theory

Conceptual metaphor is an indispensable part of cognitive linguistics.Lakoff and Johnson(1980)advocate that conceptual metaphor,as a way of thinking,is pervasive in everyday language,thought and action.It mainly concerns understanding abstract domains in terms of the domains that are more concrete and familiar to people.Lakoff(2004)further points out that the source domain and the target domain of a conceptual metaphor correspond to two frames.A metaphorical word can activate a metaphorical frame and the mappings between two frames construct conceptual metaphors.As an increasing number of linguists are starting to study conceptual metaphor in different kinds of discourses,economic news which is closely related to people's daily life attracts more attention of them.In this thesis,a cognitive analysis of conceptual metaphors in American economic news from the perspective of framing theory is made to explore how conceptual metaphors and frames are used to reflect certain attitudes of The Wall Street Journal towards China and America so as to influence the public.The analytical materials are seventy pieces of economic news about the trade war in 2018 between China and America collected from The Wall Street Journal.By adopting the corpus tool Wmatrix to determine target domains and target words,the corpus tool BFSU Collocator 1.0 to extract significant collocates of target words and MIPVU to identify metaphorical words,with quantitative and qualitative methods combined,this thesis is intended to answer the research questions as follows:(1)What kinds of conceptual metaphors are used in the American economic news on the Sino-US trade war?(2)What kinds of attitudes towards China and America are reflected by the conceptual metaphors and frames used in the American economic news on the Sino-US trade war?Several conclusions can be drawn in this thesis based on the analysis and discussion.First,conceptual metaphors are found to abound in the economic news collected from The Wall Street Journal.Altogether 1166 metaphorical words are identified.Conceptual metaphors generalized can be classified into two groups.The first group is closely related to business.Those conceptual metaphors in the order of their frequencies in the data are as follows: ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IS WAR,living organism metaphors like ECONOMY IS PLANT and COMPANY IS HUMAN BEING,object metaphors like ECONOMY IS OBJECT,MARKET IS CONTAINER and COMPANY IS MACHINE,ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IS SPORT and ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IS JOURNEY.The second group is strongly associated with money.Those conceptual metaphors in the order of their frequencies in the data are as follows: orientational metaphors MORE MONEY IS UP and LESS MONEY IS DOWN and MONEY IS LIQUID.It is also found that in the data,different attitudes of The Wall Street Journal towards America and China are reflected by virtue of the conceptual metaphors and frames.The data reflects a positive attitude towards America by depicting America as an economically powerful country that has the upper hand in that trade war with China in the war frame and justifying America's behavior of launching that trade war in the object frame.In contrast,a negative attitude towards China is even more clearly demonstrated in the data from the following two aspects: China's economic aggression and hostility against America and China's weak economic strength.The contrast thus produced,for one thing,may lead news readers to subconsciously believe that China is at a disadvantage and suffers greater economic losses during its trade war with America.For another,that contrast may help America greatly enhance its citizens' confidence in it and its economic strength and simultaneously gain more support from home and abroad during its trade war with China.The implications gained from this thesis can mainly unfold from two aspects.First,this thesis proves that news readers should learn to be critical readers because apart from economic information,certain attitudes and ideologies are also contained in economic news.Second,this thesis can to some degree help people better understand the economic news which usually contains many abstract and complex concepts related to economy.