........
2.2 Previous Studies of Economic News
Due to its special features, economic news is distinct from other genres of news. Withinthe linguistic field, different approaches are employed to analyze it. For example, Zhang Jian(2003) probes into the features of English economic reports on the lexical and grammaticallevels, and he adopts the view that economic reports share the common stylistics features ofnews like specific, accuracy, and brevity. However, it owns its special features, such aspresenting economic terminologies by common words, employing short and livelycontrastive verbs, using idiom and figures of speech properly, exploiting different kinds ofgrammatical ways to compare developing currents and so on. Besides, differentiatingfrom Zhang Jian (2003) who only examines economic news in a descriptive way, scholarslike Chen Zhongzhu (1995) and Tian Fen (2011) investigate economic news in an interpretiveapproach. On the basis of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, Chen Zhongzhu (1995)conducts a research on the transitivity, modality and thematic choice in economic news,which reveals the relationship between power and ideology. Tian Fen (2011) contrasts thejudgment system between Chinese and English economic hard news, which is the sub-systemof attitude in Appraisal Theory, and explains the differences between them from the ideologyand culture angles. In addition, unlike domestic scholars, foreign scholar Richardson (1998)touches upon economic news in a macroscopic way. In the book Signs and Wonders:Interpreting the Economy through Television, he explores the factors which influencepeople’s understanding of economic news. After presenting the audience a piece of newswhich is full of ambiguity and indeterminacy broadcasted by BBC, he observes theirresponses. Finally, he finds that special context, social environment, people’s background andsocial value all play crucial roles in their comprehension.
........
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.... 10
3.1 Conceptual Metaphor Theory..... 10
3.2 Attitude System in Appraisal Theory........ 15
3.2.1 Affect...... 17
3.2.2 Judgment ..... 17
3.2.3 Appreciation ..... 18
3.3 The Relationship between Conceptual Metaphor and Evaluation .... 19
Chapter Four Research Methodology ....... 21
4.1 Data Collection....... 21
4.2 Data Identification....... 21
4.3 Research Procedures ........ 23
Chapter Five Results and Discussion.... 25
5.1 Conceptual Metaphors Used in China-related Economic News ....... 25
5.2 Evaluative Function of Conceptual Metaphors as Attitudinal..... 27
5.3 Distribution of Conceptual Metaphors as Different Attitudinal....29
Chapter Five Results and Discussion
5.1 Conceptual Metaphors Used in China-related Economic News
After annotating the data several times, altogether 1,690 metaphori
