A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And American Mainstream Media’s Reports On The Reminiscence Of Kobe Bryant

As a cognitive way,conceptual metaphor is widely used in people’s daily life.Metaphorical expressions do not only reflect people’s way of thinking,but also reflect their view of the material world.As the top basketball star in the NBA,Kobe Bryant becomes the hotspot among the public,which makes him the focus of media reports.Chinese and American media adopt a lot of conceptual metaphors in reports about remembering him to achieve different reporting effects.Based on the theoretical basis of conceptual metaphor theory,this thesis uses a quantitative and qualitative method to select 17 reports about “remembering Kobe Bryant” from the mainstream media of China and America as the corpus,and then makes a comparative study of the conceptual metaphor in the corpus.Specifically,in the stage of quantitative research,this thesis uses the corpus software Ant Conc 3.4.4 and the criterion of metaphor recognition in “critical metaphor analysis” proposed by Charteris-Black to classify and process the corpora,and then makes statistics on the number and frequency of different conceptual metaphors.In the stage of qualitative research,according to the three steps of critical metaphor analysis proposed by Charteris-Black,this thesis attempts to reveal the relationship between conceptual metaphor and the information behind it,and then analyze the ideology and emotional attitude of Chinese and American medium.In conclusion,based on the conceptual metaphor theory and the study of corpus classification,this thesis aims to solve the following three problems:(1)What types of conceptual metaphors are used in Chinese and American media reports on the reminiscence of Kobe Bryant?(2)What are the similarities and differences on the use of conceptual metaphors in the reports on the reminiscence of Kobe Bryant between China and America?(3)What are the reasons for the similarities and differences on the use of conceptual metaphor in Chinese and American media reports on the reminiscence of Kobe Bryant?Through the corpora analysis,the author finds that:(1)63 conceptual metaphors,such as human metaphor,journey metaphor,nature metaphor,plant metaphor,war metaphor,drama metaphor and economic metaphor,are used in the reports of China and America on the reminiscence of Kobe Bryant.(2)There are 28 common conceptual metaphors such as human metaphor,journey metaphor,drama metaphor,nature metaphor,plant metaphor,war metaphor and 7 unique metaphors in the reports about the reminiscence of Kobe Bryant in China and America.There are five specific conceptual metaphors in Chinese corpus,which are swordsmen metaphor,emperor metaphor,religion metaphor,Chinese medicine metaphor and myth metaphor.There are two specific conceptual metaphors in English Corpus: comic metaphor and religion metaphor.In addition,there are also differences in the proportion of these conceptual metaphors used in media reports between China and America.(3)The author classifies these differences into two aspects: ideology and emotional attitude,including religious belief,social background and cultural differences.