Conceptual metaphors for SARS: 'war' between whom?

Abstract

By analyzing naming strategies and conceptual metaphors for SARS in three major broadsheet newspapers, The Liberty Times and The United Daily News in Taiwan, and The People's Daily in China, this article demonstrates how the political agendas and underlying ideologies of newspapers permeate their use of metaphors. Taking critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) as the theoretical framework, we analyze how the DISEASE IS WAR metaphor, in particular, constructs Self and Other, as well as several other metaphors (e.g. DISEASE IS A NATURAL DISASTER/ A DISASTER IN GENERAL). We argue that all the linguistic devices under consideration represent SARS as an issue in the domain of political rather than medical discourse.

News discourses on distant suffering: a Critical Discourse Analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak

“…Leung and Huang (2007) for instance found the news frames on SARS stressing China's institutional mismanagement of the outbreak, bureaucratic obstacles, poor health system and primitive living conditions, thus resulting in an unfavorable representation of China as a negative 'Other'. Regarding the applied methodologies, it is remarkable to notice the dominance of framing studies (see Luther and Zhou, 2004;Tian and Stewart, 2005;Beaudoin, 2007) while so far only a small body of research (see Chiang and Duann, 2007) has analyzed SARS by applying discourse analysis as this article strives to do so. For this purpose, we will draw upon Chouliaraki's theory on the mediation of suffering.…”

“…The shift from a local to a global news event co-occurred with the spread of the disease across the globe and was largely fuelled by the high fatality rate (9.6%) of the new unknown disease and its proximity to Western audiences. SARS was also the first severe infectious disease that emerged in the 21 st century and had an enormous social, economic and political impact (Chiang and Duann, 2007). Consequently, the epidemic received substantial media coverage, which since then has Source: based on data retrieved from the Electronic News Archive (ENA), University of Antwerp (www.nieuwsarchief.be)…”

Multimodal Fusion in Analyzing Political Cartoons: Debates on U.S. Beef Imports Into Taiwan

“…H. Lin, 1987) of which President Ma is the chairman. Thus, UDN shows stronger support for President Ma and favors a softer policy and positive attitudes toward China (Chiang & Duann, 2007). Table 1 presents the distribution of the political cartoons in the multimodal corpus.…”

Espejos Metafóricos de Occidente: China en la Prensa Económica Británica

“…Santa Ana, 1999), in political discourse (e.g. Chiang and Duann, 2007;Mulsolff, 2004;Musolff, 2006), in economic and business discourse (e.g. Alejo, 2010;Charteris-Black, 2004;Koller, 2004), in sports reporting (e.g.…”