A Corpus-Based Study on Metaphor and Hyperbole in English News Discourse

摘要

A corpus-based analysis of English economic news discourse (10,808 words) is conducted to explore how metaphor and hyperbole are related. The research measuring the isolation and combination of the two tropes across word class shows that the figure of metaphor occurs more frequently in news discourse than hyperbole does. The combination of metaphor and hyperbole is another prominent type of figurative language use differing from the respective usage of either trope. The reason lies in that the two tropes are related to different word classes and their combinations, which are mostly found in nouns and verbs, have distinct features compared to either trope used in isolation. Therefore, this study supports the hypothesis defining metaphor and hyperbole as two discrete categories.