Abstract
The glut of information in contemporary networked societies has helped create economies of attention (Lanham, 2006) in which the pressures to be seen and heard have engendered new discursive practices. Some of these can be found in our diversified news media ecologies. As news markets have fragmented and the competition for viewers’ attention has grown, media content has increasingly emphasized style over substance, which has reshaped not only its meaning but also the social functions of news. Chong Han, in this engaging research monograph, explores this process by studying uses of metaphor in Chinese online news discourse. Using corpus linguistics and metaphor analysis, she identifies an array of high-frequency source domains, examines their usage in online entertainment news, and compares them across other Chinese news genres. In doing so, she adds to our understandings of contemporary Chinese cultural and social practices. She also broadens the framework for interpreting metaphor in media discourse, particularly in soft news genres, through her insightful analyses of the creative uses of metaphor in Chinese.
Research on metaphor in discourse has often centered on its rhetorical function for capturing attention and its role in constructing a mental framework of social knowledge and world views (Chilton, 2004). Han extends that work by adopting conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) to consider the cognitive links that emerge from metaphor mappings, showing how the economy of attention shapes metaphor selection and the ways those selections appeal to both cognition and emotion. In particular, she argues that metaphors used in Chinese online entertainment news create drama by exaggerating the scale and intensity of events and by emphasizing interpersonal conflict. These discursive practices, she contends, increase the entertainment value of news, but they also exploit expressions of traditional culture and values historically present in Chinese news discourse. As a result, these metaphors, Han claims, can negatively influence readers’ perceptions of Chinese society.
Han grounds this argument in both media discourse theory and recent Chinese history. In Chapters 1 and 2, she discusses how, since China’s move from a planned to a market economy, its media ecology has trended toward the entertainmentalization of news. The result is an increasingly hybrid online entertainment news discourse in which information is complexly blended with literary traditions and popular culture to make news appealing and accessible. Stemming from marketplace demands for viewers’ attention, these changes have also come from the emergence of novel news genres. And it is in the context of a given genre and its communicative goals, Han claims, that we should consider the ways in which news metaphors are conceptualized. She goes on to argue, in Chapter 3, how certain characteristics of Chinese metaphors are key to understanding their role in media discourse. She explains, for instance, how Chinese metaphors derive meaning from both the words and the ways that characters represent them, a feature which allows for the language play she finds characteristic of Chinese entertainment news genres. In Chapter 4, Han outlines her approaches to researching these metaphors and genres, arguing that complementing CMT with critical metaphor analysis, which utilizes corpus linguistics, can help address concerns about CMT’s reliance on decontextualized language. She also advocates for cross-genre comparisons to study metaphor’s rhetorical and pragmatic functions.
With these contexts established, Han argues, in Chapters 5–7, that metaphor use in Chinese online news reflects both China’s recent socioeconomic transformations and its long-standing cultural traditions. She argues that the prominence of war metaphors, for instance, reflects an intense competition for markets and viewers. At the same time, Han locates in Chinese literary traditions the playful use of metaphor to dramatize and promote events. She claims this practice, which is also common in Chinese popular culture, creates a conceptual blend that allows entertainment news to be readily integrated into the cultural imagination, a process of recycling cultural themes in news genres that works to reinforce the Chinese value system. Han also shows, through cross-genre comparisons, how metaphors used in soft news genres to create hyperbole can, in hard news, serve the news media’s instructional and propagandistic functions. Han stops short of classifying these practices as ideological. She does conclude, however, in Chapter 8, that these appeals to viewers’ emotions, while engendering group intimacy and collective identifications, risk distorting perceptions of Chinese society as rife with drama and spectacle.
Insights such as these make this a convincingly argued study that is strongly grounded in understandings of Chinese news genres and contemporary media trends. It is also firmly grounded in metaphor theory and a balanced research approach that pairs fine-grained qualitative research with corpus data to produce analyses that are well-documented with contextualized evidence. Some discussions of conceptual blends in metaphor, while clearly represented in figures, could be stronger, in particular how Han reconciles top-down considerations of cognition with the social functions of genre (Hart, 2008). Similarly, perhaps more specific considerations of uptake and agency would enrich her discussions about the social role of metaphors in persuading readers or capturing their attention. Nevertheless, this fascinating study expands current approaches to analyzing metaphor in discourse and would interest media discourse analysts, metaphor researchers and Chinese studies scholars. It would also appeal to those interested in non-Western discourses and, because of the clarity of its writing and organization, students learning discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.