A Study on the Conceptual Metaphor of News Reports on COVID-19 in Mainstream English Media in China — A Case Study of <i>China Daily</i>

Abstract

Traditional metaphor regards metaphor as a rhetorical device, and believes that metaphor is merely an embellishment or decoration in the form of language, and its main metaphorical function is to beautify the language, and to enhance the effect of language expression. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, put forward by the famous linguist Lakoff in 1980, enables the study of metaphor to realize a cognitive turn. In recent years, the study of conceptual metaphor has not only been applied to the analysis of word meaning and general text, but also extended to news discourse. The study of conceptual metaphor in news discourse has become one of the important hot topics of current research. At the beginning of 2020, the outbreak and spread of the new crown pneumonia epidemic is testing people all over the world. As China’s mainstream English-language media, <i>China Daily</i> frequently reports on this hot social event. This study intends to collect reports on COVID-19 in <i>China Daily</i> from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 and establish a corpus to study further its conceptual metaphors. Finally, this study finds eight main kinds of conceptual metaphors, including war metaphors, journey metaphors, building metaphors, human metaphors, light metaphors, book metaphors, plant metaphors and evil metaphors. The metaphors reflect China’s values of courage, struggle and harmony as well as its social awareness of actively building a community with a shared future for mankind.