Comparative Analysis of the Use of Metaphors in Russian, English and Chinese Media Texts of Informational and Influencing Nature

Abstract

The authors analyze the issue of the relationship between metaphoricity in informational media texts and its speech impact on the recipient on the example of Russian, English and Chinese sources. As an initial hypothesis, the authors use the assumption based on the fact that media texts which differ in pragmatic characteristics contain a different index of metaphoricity. To test the hypothesis, a method was developed for calculating the indices of metaphoricity: density, intensity, functions, and the relationship of metaphors with the external and internal structure of the text. The values of these indices were consistently calculated for news reports in three languages, conditionally divided into two groups: informational and evaluative. The analysis showed that, according to the values of all indices, the metaphoricity of texts with an influencing potential is higher than that of texts that perform mainly an informational function. The “evaluation” texts have on average one and a half times more metaphors, they are much more intense, and they use more structural metaphors. In such texts, metaphors are more often found not in the main part of the text, but in the water part and in the conclusion, but in relation to the structure of the text - in them, metaphors are more often concentrated around the rhema. The results confirm the initial hypothesis: metaphoricity is indeed associated with potential impact, and metaphors are used by the authors of media texts to form an assessment of the subject of speech utterance. The proposed method for calculating the metaphoricity indices can be used as an effective tool for calculating this speech impact.