关键词: “一带一路”倡议; 批评隐喻分析; 语料库; 朝日新闻; 日本媒体

Abstract:

The attitude of the Government of Japan (GoJ) toward the Belt and Road Initiative has gone through three stages, namely, the “questioning stage”, the “wait-and-see stage”, and the “stage of limited areas of cooperation with China”. Aiming at representing the GoJ’s attitude changes in discourse, the present study adopts the critical metaphor theory into the analysis of Japanese news discourse and builds a corpus based on the topic of the Belt and Road Initiative by the Asahi Shimbun. The analytical results suggest that the metaphors adopted in the three stages have shifted from conflict metaphors to journey metaphors and building metaphors, which implicitly represents the diachronic change in the GoJ’s attitude toward the initiative from conflict to cooperation in limited areas. Critical metaphor analysis is an effective construal operation for objectively reproducing the real attitudes, intentions, and values of social actors in news discourse.

Keywords: the Belt and Road Initiative; critical metaphor analysis; corpus; Asahi Shimbun; Japanese media