A Comparative Study of the Evaluation Function of War Metaphors in the Perspective of Critical Metaphors

Abstract

This paper analyzed the differences of China’s political stance and attitude in response to the recent China-US trade war and China-US epidemic war, provoked by the United States, through comparing the distribution differences of war metaphors as attitudinal resources in regular speeches relevant to these two events on the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within the framework of conceptual metaphor and evaluation theory. Through the analysis of metaphorical interpretation and metaphor explanation, the study found that in the diplomatic discourse of the China-US epidemic war, the confrontational willingness is stronger and the signal of willing to ease the China-US relationship is significantly weakened, further more, the proportion of judgement resources, especially negative social constraint in the speeches relevant to the China-US epidemic war is the highest, which indicates that China’s opposing attitude on this event is more resolute. It is hoped that the results of this study will help to explore the application potential of evaluative function of war metaphor discourse strategy in facilitating the enhancement of China’s diplomatic discourse power.