ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Metaphorical construction of the belt and road initiative in German media: a transnational study based on critical metaphor analysis.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
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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