The conceptual metaphor of the Vietnam war in American press = Ẩn dụ ý niệm về cuộc chiến tranh Việt Nam trong báo chí Mỹ

Tóm tắt

The Vietnam War is one of the most dreadful and controversial events in the human
 history in the 20th century. This study attempts to investigate the dynamic and critical
 metaphorical conceptualization of the war from the perspectives of the insiders – American
 war correspondents– through an evaluation of the conceptual metaphors used in their articles
 published during the wartime. Methodologically, the current study applies a proposed
 integrated framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis – CMA (Charteris-Black, 2004) and
 Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor – MLV (Kövecses, 2017a) in order to gain deeper
 insights into ideologies motivating metaphorical concepts for the war as well as to elucidate
 the cognitive pathway of metaphorical conceptualization via four levels. The mixed-methods
 approach adopted aims to fill two gaps in metaphor study: insufficient research into the war
 concept as the target domain and a framework with optimal balance of pragmatic and
 cognitive dimensions. The study yields some notable results. Firstly, it reveals the
 persistence of certain concepts commonly associated with the Vietnam War during the
 wartime (a journey, business, a non-living thing, a natural phenomenon, terrain, competition,
 art, movement) and other emerging concepts at different times (force, destruction, a plant, a
 human, a game, a danger, a belief, a duty, a construction, an animal, hunting, containment,
 an unpleasant thing, a domestic affair, a disease, a living being, healthcare treatment).
 Interestingly, more than half of the 25 generic and 105 specific metaphors present in the data
 are not mentioned before, which can be accounted for by three factors: the employment of
 inductive approach and the closest background principle as well as the correspondents’
 ample war experiences generating metaphors. These findings of the source domains for the
 war substantiate the effectiveness of three proposed principles of domain formulation in the
 study, namely a balance between synchronic and diachronic views, context-based domain
 formulation and the closest background principle. Secondly, the employment of four
 conceptual levels (image schema, domain, frame, mental space) enables the identification of
 source domains with greater reliability and allows the dynamic process of metaphorical
 conceptualization to be clearly demonstrated from embodied cognition at image schema to
 metaphorical meaning in discourse at mental space. The outcomes justify a suggested
 procedure with four steps to assist the verification of these four conceptual layers. Thirdly,
 the examination of ideologies motivating the metaphors found in the data indicates that
 almost all the correspondents’ viewpoints on the war are close to the anti-war position with
 the mental images of devastating and uncontrollable war, inescapable victims, exhausting
 competition, merciless grinding machine, etc. Based on the comparison with the previous
 studies, the current research acknowledges that the understanding of ideologies can vary
 depending on the researcher’s experiences and discourse contexts. Finally, the proposed
 MLV- CMA framework clarifies the relationship between ideologies and conceptual levels,
 in which ideologies are embedded in all four conceptual levels and systematically develop
 with increasing specificity from image schema to domain, frame and mental space.