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Article published In: Cultural Linguistic Contributions to World Englishes
Edited by Hans-Georg Wolf, Frank Polzenhagen and Arne Peters
[International Journal of Language and Culture 4:2] 2017
► pp. 215–233

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Conceptualizations of sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China

An analysis of the Occupy Central Movement in the Western press

 | University of Potsdam
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.4.2.05leu
Abstract
This study of media discourse focuses on how the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is conceptualized by the English-speaking press. To this end, the present research studies newspaper articles on the Hong Kong Occupy Central Movement published in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Cultural Linguistics, combined with corpus analytical techniques, is used to examine the construals of hong kong and mainland china. A 303,455-word corpus which contains 402 articles was compiled for data analysis. It is found that the disagreement between the Hong Kong civilians and the Mainland Chinese government is often reported with metonymical conceptualizations (place for inhabitants versus place for the institution). In general, the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is imbued with negative emotions, disharmony, and power differences, as is evident from the body, illness, disease, container, and possession conceptualizations. At the end of this paper, issues about researching conceptualizations in newspaper texts, such as the journalistic input, are discussed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Cultural Linguistics
    • 2.2Empirical studies
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Conceptualizations of hong kong
    • 4.2Conceptualizations of mainland china
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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