A Critical Metaphor Analysis on Green Development News Discourse from the Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, environmental problems are becoming increasingly prominent. As an important means of information dissemination, news discourse not only reflects the degree of social concern about environmental issues, but also largely shapes the public's cognition and attitude towards these issues. Metaphor, as a way of thinking, can simplify people's cognitive process and play an important role in news discourse practice. This paper organically combines the Conceptual Metaphor Theory with the Critical Metaphor Analysis research paradigm, extracts 384 green development news reports from China Daily from 2016 to 2023 as the research object, and organizes them into electric files to form a self-built corpus. The purpose is to explore the metaphorical expressions in news discourse and conduct critical analysis through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, so as to provide a language strategy reference for the external dissemination of China's green development concept in the context of emphasizing international cooperation to protect the global environment.