The US-China battle over Coronavirus in the news media: Metaphor transfer as a representation of stance mediation

Abstract

Drawing upon a corpus approach to metaphor analysis, stance analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study analyzes different stances taken by the Chinese news outlet Global Times (GT) and the American The New York Times (NYT) in 2020 Coronavirus narratives to Chinese and English readers. The database includes all Coronavirus-related GT and NYT bilingual opinion articles in 2020, that is, 97 pairs from GT and 73 pairs from NYT which are comparable in Chinese and English tokens. Results show that the differences between GT and NYT in narrating the pandemic and the involved parties, that is, China and the US, are statistically significant with a moderate to strong effect size. The Lambda test of association demonstrates that the knowledge of metaphor transfer methods can significantly increase the correctness of attitudinal intensity prediction, which bears out metaphor transfer as a representation of stance mediation.

Modelability of WAR metaphors across time in cross-national COVID-19 news translation: An insight into ideology manipulation

“…de Saint et al, 2021 , Puglisi, 2011 , Liu and Li, 2022 , Liu and Li, 2023 , Tay, 2017 , Tay, 2019 , Tay, 2021a , Tay, 2021b , Tay, 2022a , Tay, 2022b .…”

Comparing COVID-19 metaphors in Chinese and English social media with critical metaphor analysis

“…Various researchers have applied CMA to examine the metaphorical construction of China’s image in the U.S. mainstream media. They conclude that these media outlets predominantly portray China as an adversary and competitor by carefully selecting source domains for their metaphors ( Liu and Li, 2022 ).…”

A Micro-Diachronic Corpus Investigation of Violence-Related Metaphors Used to Frame China during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Accordingly, linguistic metaphors identified in discourse can be considered linguistic realisations of conceptual metaphors (e.g., she is in high spirit is a lexical realisation of the conceptual metaphor happy is up). Discourse analysis scholars have emphasised the role of metaphors in conveying certain ideologies and evaluations (Fairclough 1995;Liu and Li 2022), specifically focusing on their framing effect, defined as emphasising "some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described" (Entman 1993, 52).…”