| Discourse is considered to be a form of social interaction,as well as the expression and reproduction of social cognition.News discourse,as one of the main kinds of discourse,is highly relevant and purposeful.News discourse to some extent embodies ideology and discourse power,and its presentation of facts is unavoidably influenced by subjectivity,thus potentially influencing the readers’ cognition and thoughts.As the Sino-US trade war has intensified in recent years,especially the new round of the Sino-US trade war in 2018,the Chinese company Huawei and its 5G plan have become the main target of the trade conflict,and the US government has implemented a series of policies and measures to restrict and crack down on the development of Huawei’s 5G technology and equipment,which has attracted much attention from media worldwide.Against this backdrop,the paper attempts to make an analysis of the US media’s news reports on Huawei 5G issue from the perspective of critical cognitive linguistics to study the ideology of the American side and the employment of discursive strategies in the news reports.It also explores how the US media manipulates discourse to influence the audience’s perception to further achieve the legitimization of the policies of sanctioning Huawei and its 5G plan.This paper collected the related news reports on Huawei 5G plan from 2018 to 2020 on the website of the New York Times,a mainstream news media in America,and then made a self-built corpus to make a qualitative and quantitative analysis with the concordance software Ant Conc.It attempts to combine the proximization theory and conceptual metaphor theory to make a new analytical theoretical framework with a view to exploring the employment of discourse legitimization strategies and unveiling the process of legitimization realization from the perspective of critical cognitive linguistics.This paper aims to answer the following three questions: 1)What are the characteristics of linguistic resources from spatial,temporal and axiological proximization strategies in the NYT news reports on Huawei 5G? 2)How is conceptual metaphor integrated into the proximization strategies and what kind of functions does it serve? 3)How are these discursive strategies employed to achieve the legitimization purpose of the American news media?By the analysis,this paper finds that proximization legitimization strategies and conceptual metaphor legitimization strategies are manifested in the reports,and they are complementary to each other in the US media’s manipulation of the readers’ construal operation process of news discourse as well as the achievement of the discourse purpose of legitimization.To be specific,firstly,in terms of proximization strategies,spatial proximization,temporal proximization and axiological proximization all play an important role and present some features in the construction of the images of IDCs,ODCs and the dynamic cognitive process of the intrusion of ODCs into IDCs.Of the three proximization strategies,spatial proximization strategy is the most used and the axiological one is the least.In terms of the spatial proximization strategy,the US media formed a spatial proximization framework to construe the threats of ODCs by introducing the antagonistic relation between ODCs and IDCs,the speed of impact of IDCs and the consequence of impact of IDCs.Moreover,its lexical-grammatical resources focus more on the description of ODCs rather than IDCs,and the speed and consequence of ODCs impact are mainly presented through the types of ODCs’ threats and the ways they are constructed.In terms of the temporal proximization strategy,the US media mainly use modal verbs and the perfect tense which reflects more the“future-present” conceptual transfer to present the threat of ODCs,thus arousing the audience’s fear of the unknown future.In terms of the axiological proximization strategy,the US media puts an emphasis on portraying the positive values of the IDCs for the legitimization of the US related policies.Secondly,in terms of the metaphor legitimization strategy,the US media mainly used four kinds of conceptual metaphors—the “war” metaphor,the “race” metaphor,the “human” metaphor and the “building”metaphor,which are used to achieve the pragmatic function of reinforcing the antagonistic relation between IDCs and ODCs and the persuasive effect of appealing fear of the audience.The conceptual metaphor legitimization strategy further decodes partly the linguistic representations of three proximization strategies in the audience’s cognition construal,during which nomination and predication with negative meanings are commonly involved to strengthen the legitimization.Besides,this discursive strategy also makes a complementary construal of some linguistic representations that are not included in the proximization strategies with the unique cognitive characteristics of conceptual metaphor itself.Finally,by the integrated analysis of proximization and conceptual metaphor legitimization strategies,it is found that the US media tends to manipulate discursive strategies to influence the audience’s cognitive construal process for the purpose of legitimizing their policies towards Huawei and China.It also tries to stigmatize China and Huawei through the employment of specific discursive strategies to construct their negative identities as like “thieves” and “perpetrators”.In this way,the US media can gain the support of the readers and legitimize their policies towards China by arousing the audience’s fear from the Chinese side and sympathy for the US side.In conclusion,this paper illustrates the feasibility of integrating conceptual metaphor theory into proximization theory to mutually achieve the legitimization of discourse from the perspective of critical cognitive linguistics.It also hopes to provide some enlightenment and guidance for the understanding of the ideology behind discourse and the adoption of practical coping strategies for the Chinese side. |
PDF Full Text Request