Metaphorical construction of Super Girl in Chinese Internet media discourse

In the summer of 2004, the TV musical talent competition Super Girl' attracted a great number of participants and achieved soaring audience ratings in a little over three months in the People's Republic of China. In the following two years, the program surpassed its first year by achieving the highest audience rating of all entertainment TV programs in the whole country. The huge success of Super Girl, and its unprecedented involvement of the audience through SMS, online chat rooms and online posted comments, attracted great media attention, and generated a heated ongoing debate on the Internet about its impact on Chinese society. The media reports and online comments describing, praising and criticising the program were laden with metaphors. Metaphor is a powerful linguistic resource in media discourse, a rhetorical tool for representing the world as well as a conceptual means to influence the audience's beliefs about the world and the way it ought to be. This rhetorical and ideological function of metaphor has been widely demonstrated in the literature. This paper is an attempt to present an analysis of the use of metaphor in the Internet media's .coverage of this program. It aims to investigate the various ways this program is understood by different groups of people - journalists, officials, fans and ordinary viewers. It also aims to unveil conflicting ideologies revealed by attitudes towards a popular TV program in present-day China.