Changes in Metaphor Use in Media Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Diachronic Study (2007-2018)

Abstract

Media reports are often analyzed as a specialized variety of discourse that may reflect the social and cultural values of a nation, and metaphors always function to enhance the effectiveness of media discourse. Metaphors in news have long been explored by sociolinguistic researchers, but diachronic studies that examine how metaphor use changes over time are still limited. Following a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examined the metaphorical characterizations of corruption-related concepts in three English-language news media of China (Global Times, China Daily, and People’s Daily) over 12 years from 2007 to 2018. The findings can be summarized into the following four aspects: (1) The types of source domains were largely stable over time, i.e., WAR, POISON and DISEASE, DIRT, PLANT, and ANIMAL; (2) The mapping within a source domain changed diachronically; (3) Increased use of creative metaphors and enriched metaphorical depictions were found in the more recent years; and (4) The metaphors appeared to evoke more Chinese cultural schemas across time, which in turn provided contexts for further understandings of these metaphors. It is thus argued that the news discourse in China has been experiencing an ongoing process to employ more creative metaphors to express Chinese worldviews and cultural beliefs. It has also shown that a qualitative discourse analysis combined with quantitative corpus-assisted methods can provide effective research framework for an in-depth diachronic understanding of the changes in metaphor use. This study may be of assistance to researchers who are interested in media studies, sociolinguistics, and news writing.