Conceptualizations of sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Abstract

AbstractThis study of media discourse focuses on how the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is conceptualized by the English-speaking press. To this end, the present research studies newspaper articles on the Hong Kong Occupy Central Movement published in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Cultural Linguistics, combined with corpus analytical techniques, is used to examine the construals ofhong kongandmainland china. A 303,455-word corpus which contains 402 articles was compiled for data analysis. It is found that the disagreement between the Hong Kong civilians and the Mainland Chinese government is often reported with metonymical conceptualizations (place for inhabitantsversusplace for the institution). In general, the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is imbued with negative emotions, disharmony, and power differences, as is evident from thebody,illness,disease,container, andpossessionconceptualizations. At the end of this paper, issues about researching conceptualizations in newspaper texts, such as the journalistic input, are discussed.