This paper identifies metaphors in newspaper English, specifically the articles in China Daily, as the research object. Many linguists have studies metaphors in newspaper English, but research perspective is only limi...This paper identifies metaphors in newspaper English, specifically the articles in China Daily, as the research object. Many linguists have studies metaphors in newspaper English, but research perspective is only limited to the classification of metaphor, and not analyses the trends for each type of metaphor from the diachronic approach, therefore, this paper aims to make up for this deficiency. Thirty-six articles are randomly sampled from China Daily in the year of 2010, to make up a small corpus. Then the occurrence frequency of every kind of metaphor of recent years in this corpus is analyzed. Finally, it is found that the occurrence frequency of orientational metaphors shows a decreasing tendency, while those of the ontological and structural metaphors are relatively stable. We have found two reasons for this trend appears. Firstly, orientational metaphors are used less frequently, because they often appear when it comes to the description of numbers, and digital change itself has a lot of direct expression Secondly, structural metaphor and ontological metaphor are relatively stable, because the former helps the readers to understand the new things; the latter can expressed lively展开更多
文摘This paper identifies metaphors in newspaper English, specifically the articles in China Daily, as the research object. Many linguists have studies metaphors in newspaper English, but research perspective is only limited to the classification of metaphor, and not analyses the trends for each type of metaphor from the diachronic approach, therefore, this paper aims to make up for this deficiency. Thirty-six articles are randomly sampled from China Daily in the year of 2010, to make up a small corpus. Then the occurrence frequency of every kind of metaphor of recent years in this corpus is analyzed. Finally, it is found that the occurrence frequency of orientational metaphors shows a decreasing tendency, while those of the ontological and structural metaphors are relatively stable. We have found two reasons for this trend appears. Firstly, orientational metaphors are used less frequently, because they often appear when it comes to the description of numbers, and digital change itself has a lot of direct expression Secondly, structural metaphor and ontological metaphor are relatively stable, because the former helps the readers to understand the new things; the latter can expressed lively
