Abstract
Entertainment news is one of the most popular forms of online news in contemporary China (cf. Yu, 2007). It serves not only to convey information about the entertainment industry and its products but also to entertain readers. Metaphor, a salient linguistic feature of this news genre, is the object of investigation in this study. The findings are based on the exploration of a general corpus of Chinese online entertainment news: 1,016 full-length news items, totalling 856,374 Chinese characters, collected during May to June in 2007 from online news sources in China. Popular source domains of metaphors (war, martial arts, fire, wind, food, 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. These findings demonstrate that metaphors are 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. The findings also show that China’s changing media ecology has affected the way that metaphors emerge into discourse, are communicated, and interact with each other.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Chinese Under Globalization: Emerging Trends in Language use in China |
| Editors | Jin Liu, Hongyin Tao |
| Place of Publication | U.S.A. |
| Publisher | World Scientific |
| Pages | 29-57 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9789814350709 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9789814350693 |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Keywords
- Internet
- entertainment news
- news web sites