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Metaphorical construction of the belt and road initiative in German media: a transnational study based on critical
1Department of Foreign Language, Shanghai Customs University, Shanghai, China.
Introduction:
Media representations of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) play a significant role in shaping public understanding of China's flagship transnational initiative. Despite growing scholarly interest in BRI discourse, the metaphorical mechanisms underlying German media coverage remain underexplored.
Methods:
Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) as its theoretical foundation and employing Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) as its analytical approach, this study adopts a corpus-based mixed-methods design to analyze 1,247 articles totaling 856,432 words from four major German mainstream media outlets spanning 2013 to 2024.
Results:
The analysis identifies 2,847 metaphorical expressions across five dominant conceptual frames: JOURNEY (31.3%), WAR (24.0%), BUILDING (18.3%), ORGANISM (15.4%), and GAME (11.0%). Temporal analysis reveals a marked shift toward confrontational framing, with WAR metaphors increasing from 18.6% to 31.2% over the observation period. Cross-national comparison positions German media between Anglo-American confrontational discourse and Chinese cooperative narratives.
Discussion:
The findings demonstrate that metaphorical framing operates as a cognitively structured and ideologically consequential mechanism in transnational political communication, with systematic variation across political orientations and temporal phases reflecting broader shifts in Sino-German geopolitical relations.
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