A Contrastive Analysis Of The Use Of Conceptual Metaphor In Chinese And American Newspapers Amid Covid-19 Pandemic

The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980)has become a milestone in the metaphor research.Metaphor is not simply a rhetorical device employed in our writing,it is also a way of thinking reflecting how we understand the world,and can be studied better at the discourse level from the cognitive perspective.So far,many studies on metaphor have been undertaken on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis and yielded fruitful results,but comparatively speaking,studies on metaphor in the disease discourse are not satisfactorily enough.Therefore,this thesis makes a comparative study of conceptual metaphors in English covid-19 pandemic news written by Chinese and those written by Americans in order to find out the similarities and differences between the use of conceptual metaphors,the attitudes conveyed and the metaphorical functions realized by the use of these metaphors.Based on conceptual metaphor theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis,this thesis builds two corpora based on 30 news reports about covid-19 pandemic respectively from People’s Daily English Edition and The Washington Post from January to June of 2020.VB programming and Antconc 3.5.9 tool were used to annotate metaphor in corpora and to calculate the distribution of different conceptual metaphors,so as to explore the underlying attitudes and the metaphorical functions of Chinese and American news reports on the prevention and control of covid-19 by their respective governments.Research questions include:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the distribution of conceptual metaphors between People’s Daily English Edition and The Washington Post?(2)What are the attitudes underlying these conceptual metaphors between Chinese and American news reports?(3)How does the metaphorical functions realize by the use of these conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American news reports?Through quantitative and qualitative analysis,it is found that:(1)There are five main metaphors in the two corpora.namely,War metaphors,Container metaphors,Human metaphors,Machine metaphors and Journey metaphors.The proportions of five metaphors used in Chinese news corpus are:War metaphors(29.39%),Container metaphors(27.09%),Human metaphors(18.73%),Machine metaphors(12.39%)and Journey metaphors(4.9%).While the proportion of metaphors used in American news corpus is Human metaphors(26.54%),Container metaphors(21.79%),War metaphors(18.44%),Journey metaphors(15.08%)and Machine metaphors(8.1%).There are some similarities and differences in the distribution of these five metaphors in Chinese and American news corpora.The similarity is that the distribution of Container metaphors and Machine metaphors is almost the same in Chinese and American news reports,which is the resulting of cultural consistency of conceptual metaphors.Influenced by different social and cultural environments,the main difference is that there are more metaphorical expressions of War metaphors in Chinese news corpus,while in American news corpus the distribution frequency of human metaphors is highest.(2)People ’s Daily English Edition and The Washington Post convey different attitudes through the use of conceptual metaphors.People’s Daily English Edition holds a positive attitude towards China’s response to covid-19 pandemic,reflecting the Chinese government is determined and confident to deal with covid-19 pandemic.In the prevention and control of the pandemic,the Chinese government has also been able to eliminate the virus from one area to the other to prevent the import of foreign countries to curb its spread in China.The effective measures of prevention and control have been praised by other countries.The Washington Post holds almost the same attitude towards the prevention of covid-19 with its government.It only publicizes the negative image of China,and even intends to smear China and make inappropriate remarks in the late stage of pandemic prevention.This indirectly reflects that the US government only blindly investigated the responsibility of other countries in the initial stage of pandemic prevention,and its own pandemic prevention is passive and lagging behind,resulting in passive resistance and little effect after the spread of the pandemic in the United States.(3)Based on contrastive analysis of Chinese and American news corpora,this thesis also illustrated the metaphorical mapping of conceptual metaphor and the construction process of ideology.Besides this,the author summarized three functions of conceptual metaphor,namely,Explanation function,Evaluation function and Empathy function.This study also enriches the scope of the research on disease discourse on the basis of the further confirmation of the pervasiveness and systematicity of metaphor.Through the contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American newspapers amid covid-19 pandemic,this thesis on the one hand reveals the inherent bias in western media reports,and on the other hand,manifests the positive image Chinese government pools resources to address major problems in solving sudden public events.Besides these,China has done its best to provide assistance to the international community under great pressure of pandemic prevention.This fully demonstrated the profound foundation of the Chinese civilization and the great power of the excellent traditional culture of China.