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

摘要：

日本政府对“一带一路”倡议的态度经历了“质疑”“观望”“区域性合作”3个阶段。本文基于自建的《朝日新闻》“一带一路”倡议专题新闻语料库，将批评隐喻分析框架应用于日语新闻语篇，分析新闻话语如何借助隐喻策略来表征日本政府对“一带一路”倡议的认知模式转变。研究发现，在3个阶段中，新闻话语的隐喻策略经历了由冲突类隐喻、旅程类隐喻到建筑类隐喻的阶段性调整，隐隐地再现了由冲突、竞争向局部合作的历时性态度转变。本研究表明，基于新闻话语的批评隐喻分析是客观再现社会行动者主体现实态度、意向和价值判断的有效话语识解手段。

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