Comparative Analysis of News Discourse on Public Health Emergencies from a Proximization Theory Perspective
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- Keywords: China Daily; SARS; COVID-19; proximization strategies; metonymic words
- Abstract: This paper describes a study built on a small corpus based on China Daily’s coverage of SARS and COVID-19 and analyzes the proximization strategies and metonymic words used on the spatial, temporal, and axiological axes. The study findsthat the two public health emergencies’ coverage at differenttimes utilizes a large number of proximization strategies and metonymic words. The differenceis that the COVID-19 news draws upon significantlymore proximization strategies than the SARS news. The findingssuggest that from SARS to COVID-19, Chinese media have accumulated substantial experience in practice and have become increasingly professional in their reporting. Specifically, during the COVID-19 outbreak, they were more skillful at employing discursive strategies to guide the public to respond to the central government’s call for anti-epidemic actively and capitalizing on discursive strategies to establish a harmonious atmosphere for all individuals to combat the epidemic and enhance the determination and cohesion in the fight.
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重点基金项目
Cultural Gender Metaphors in Modern Chinese Fiction
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- Keywords: critical cognitive analysis; gender metaphor; modern Chinese fiction; sexism/gender discrimination
- Abstract: Gender metaphors used in literary works are not merely ornamental linguistic or rhetorical devices, but are more importantly, ideological cognitive tools that exploit the readers’ search for cognitive efficiency, often giving rise to covertly sexist interpretations. However, gender metaphor has received relatively little attention in Chinese literary discourse studies. Based on a self-built corpus of ten modern Chinese fictions that consists of around 1,470,640 words, this paper aims first to identify gender metaphorical expressions in mainstream literary works during a special historical era (the Republican Era: 1912–1949), and then, by analyzing gender metaphors via a critical cognitive analysis framework, to reveal the underlying social and cultural ideologies so as to increase the consciousness of readers’ critical reading.
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