WAR Metaphor in the Chinese Economic Media Discourse

The economic media discourse depends upon a complex web of metaphors, among which WAR metaphor is worthy of special attention. The data used in this study is comprised of 2566 articles (about 1.2 million words) under the Economy column of China Daily published in 2014. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) is used as the analytical framework to investigate WAR metaphor in the economic media discourse. This study is governed by the three steps of CMA including metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. The results show that among the selected 62 lemmas, 40 of them have metaphorical instantiations and more than half of all the metaphorical expressions are nouns. Both social resources and individual resources influence metaphor choice. WAR metaphor has the rhetorical function as persuasion, which constructs the cognitive model of competition in the mind of the readers and arouses their emotions; on the other hand, it hides the cooperative principle of economic activities.