A Comparative Study on Multimodal Metaphors in the Front Pages of Chinese and Western Mainstream Newspaper: The Case of China Daily and The Economist

Abstract

The study of metaphor has a long history. Traditional metaphor theories focus on metaphor as merely a figure of speech. In cognitive linguistics, researchers believe that metaphor is not only a linguistic rhetoric phenomenon, but a fundamental and universal cognitive way for human beings to understand the world. With the development of the Internet age, multimodal information is becoming increasingly abundant, thus more attention has been paid to the study of multimodal metaphor. However, there are few studies on multimodal metaphor in the context of cultural differences between China and the West at present. Therefore, this paper takes the multimodal metaphors embodied in the images and words reflected on the front pages of China Daily and The Economist as data to analyze the different ideologies and cultural values reflected in them. This comparative study analyzes the similarities and differences between the multimodal metaphors in the front pages of China Daily and The Economist. It is found that the front pages of China Daily contain more traditional Chinese cultural elements and tend to convey positive values, while the multimodal metaphors in The Economist often have abundant connotations, indicating a more political and sarcastic tone. Meanwhile the reasons for the different choices of images are analyzed from three aspects: ideology, culture and context, thus providing some enlightenment on how to further enhance cultural confidence and better construct China's national image for domestic media.