Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Entertainment news is one of the most popular forms of online news in contemporary China. It serves not only to convey information about the entertainment industry and its products, but also to entertain its readers. Metaphor, a salient linguistic feature of this news genre, is the object of investigation in this study. Adopting an adapted version of Charteris-Black’s (2004, 2005) model of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) as the analytical framework, this study aims to demonstrate that metaphors are a powerful linguistic means of explaining and embellishing abstract concepts, an ideological tool for describing and evaluating people and situations in discourse, and a conceptual force that both reflects and potentially influences people’s perception of their world. This study also shows that China’s changing media ecology has affected the way that metaphors emerge into discourse, are communicated, and interact with each other. I argue that when used in a specific context, metaphor is at once linguistic, rhetorical, affective and conceptual; it emerges from, and may mediate in the dynamic interaction of cognition and communication, as well as reflecting physical and socio-cultural experience. This argument is supported by a three-step investigation in which the taxonomy, the use, the rhetorical purpose and potential effects of metaphors in Chinese entertainment news are analysed. The findings are based on the exploration of a general corpus of Chinese online entertainment news: 1016 full-length news items, totalling 856,374 Chinese characters, collected from May to June in 2007 in online news sources from China. Popular source domains of metaphors (war, martial arts, fire, wind, etc.) and target domains (conflict, celebrity, etc.) are identified, as well as the patterns of interaction and the functions of metaphors in Chinese entertainment news. In a second step, the significance of these metaphorical domains (e.g. war, fire, etc.) is compared across three news genres: entertainment, sports and political news. This is an attempt a) to identify the genre-specific metaphors, and b) to determine the reasons that contribute to the preferences for using particular types of metaphors across sub-genres. In a third step, a case study of a popular Chinese TV talent show Super Girl is presented. It discusses metaphors and their semantic associations constructed in and through the Internet media’s coverage of this activity, and reveals how the choice of metaphors reflects the different interests and ideologies of three distinctive groups of people: the entertainment news media, some high-ranking officials, and audience members who comment online. The study concludes with a call for increasing our awareness of and critical stance towards the impact of entertainment news and its use of metaphor.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/269582 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Han, Chong |
| Publisher | University of Sydney., Department of Linguistics |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | The author retains copyright of this thesis., http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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