ISSN: 2222-6990
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This study attempts to analyze the types of metaphors and their social functions in Chinese news media's anti-epidemic discourses to show how Chinese official media mobilizes society through discourse strategies. A total of 58 commentary articles on China's anti-epidemic response between January 26, 2020, and April 5, 2020, are selected from People's Daily to analyze the types of metaphors and their social mobilization functions. The research adopts the qualitative analysis method to identify, classify metaphors, and expounds on metaphors' social mobilization function and realization mechanism. Linguistic statistics software AntConc is used to count the total number, frequency and resonance value of all kinds of metaphorical keywords to show the application of all types of metaphors in discourse. The social mobilization function of the metaphors is mainly to enhance people's understanding of the epidemic and the characteristics of the anti-epidemic work, thus promoting the government's anti-epidemic policies and propositions to be widely accepted. The realization of the social functions of metaphor is inseparable from people's complex psychological mechanisms. This mechanism is mainly composed of cognitive, rational, and emotional systems, which jointly promote people's cognition and identification of metaphorical discourse.
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In-Text Citation: (Huijuan et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Huijuan, W., Turiman, S., & Aziz, A. A. A. (2022). The Metaphors of China’s COVID-19 News Commentary and its Social Mobilization Function. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(5), 363–377.
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