Abstract
According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphorical expressions in language can be accounted for by basic conceptual metaphors, which are pervasive in daily life. In today’s media-dominated information age, people are inundated with extensive news coverage, where conceptual metaphors function as an indispensable rhetorical and cognitive tool. From a cognitive linguistics perspective, this study integrates Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Metaphor Analysis, and corpus-based methods to conduct a comparative examination of Construction Metaphors in mainstream Chinese and US media news discourses on selected topical issues. It seeks to identify and analyze such metaphors employed for the same topic across different discourses, and to unpack the implicit cognitive frameworks underlying these metaphors in distinct media contexts. This cross-national comparison of Construction Metaphors in news reporting not only deepens readers’ grasp of news discourses and the metaphorical intentions of the two countries’ media but also enhances their understanding of the divergent political landscapes, social values, and linguistic cultures between China and the US.
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