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Introduction 

This  chapter  offers  a  general  introduction  to  this  thesis  and  it  contains  the following parts: research background, significance of the study, research questions and the organization of the whole thesis. 

1.  Research Background 
Climate change as a complex issue has influenced every domain of our social life. It gains prominence particularly when scientists present alarming data about its possible impact on human beings. Different from those specialized research defining, discussing and interpreting climate change in a scientific way, Media play an essential role in the presentation and explanation of environmental issues to enlighten the general public. In other  words,  media  function  as  interpreters,  intermediators  or  messengers  between scientific  articles  and  the  public  (Skinnemoen,  2009:  8).  Indeed,  the  media  influence “individual to community-level perceptions of climate change as well as considerations of international climate governance” (Boykoff, 2008b: 550). Metaphor is an important device  used  by  media  to  describe  the  complex  issue  concerning  climate  change.  A number of scientific topics relevant to climate change like ozone depletion or acid rain and so on seem to be very professional and require specific knowledge to understand. However, thanks to metaphors like “greenhouse effect” and “ozone hole”, we can make sense of them.  The publication of Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 indicates that  metaphor  is  no  longer  studied  from  the  rhetoric  perspective  but  also  from  the cognitive perspective. Metaphor is regarded as a principal vehicle for understanding by “mapping” conceptual structures from an experience-grounded “source domain” onto a less  well-known  “target  domain”  (Lakoff  &  Johnson,  1980:159;  Lakoff,  1993:208). However,  Lakoff  and  Johnson’s  work  (1980)  is  criticized  for  its  lack  of  authenticity because most metaphorical expressions in it are invented ones (Deignan, 2005). 
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2.  Significance of the Study
This  thesis  takes  advantage  of  the  theoretical  and  methodological  synthesis  of CMA in climate change discourse to generalize the metaphor patterns in media coverage. It helps to advance understanding of the possible motivations in using metaphors and to discover potential effects that these metaphors may have on the readers. The corpus can offer  ample  authentic  data,  which  after  statistic  analysis  can  fulfill  the  aim  of  this research. Studying conceptual metaphors of climate change in media coverage is essential in forging  its  image  and  alerting  readers’  critical  awareness  towards  news  reports.  The printed  media  “are  responsive  to  scientific  and  social &nbs本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。