Open AccessA Comparative Analysis of War Metaphors in COVID-19 Reports in New York Times and China Daily
Author(s) -
Yanmei Xiao
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of contemporary educational research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2208-8474
pISSN - 2208-8466
DOI - 10.26689/jcer.v5i5.2155
Subject(s) - china , battle , newspaper , lexis , spanish civil war , metaphor , covid-19 , politics , history , political science , psychology , media studies , economic history , sociology , medicine , linguistics , law , ancient history , disease , philosophy , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
This paper analyzed the use of war metaphors in COVID-19 news reported by the New York Times (NYT) in comparison to the China Daily from the 1st of February 2020 to the 29th of February 2020. Based on self-selected corpus from these two newspapers, a study was conducted to compare the contrasting lexis between NYT and China Daily, as well as to analyze the reasons for their differences using the Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). It was found that China Daily preferred using war metaphors in COVID-19 reports and war-related words such as “fight,” “combat,” and “battle.” These words appeared frequently which demonstrated that Chinese people were fighting against the pandemic. However, these words were far less used in the NYT reports compared to China Daily and the use of these words were more related to the election, trade war, etc. This reflected their focus which was more on the impact of COVID-19 on politics and the economic sector.