• ISSN: 2382-6282 (Print); 2972-3108 (Online)
    • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
    • Frequency: Quarterly
    • DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
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HOME > Archives > 2026 > Volume 12 Number 2 (2026) >
IJLLL 2026 Vol.12(2): 179-184
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2026.12.2.653

A Study of Deliberate Metaphor in Ageing-Related Discourse in Health News

Shuyan Wang and Zhenghao Rong*
Department of English, School of Foreign Languages, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China
Email: wsy031212@hotmail.com (S.W.); veblen@njnu.edu.cn (Z.R.)
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received April 21, 2026; accepted May 28, 2026; published June 24, 2026

Abstract—As China advances the Healthy China initiative alongside a proactive national ageing strategy, media representations of ageing have become increasingly central to the construction of national image in health discourse. This study draws on a self-compiled corpus of ageing-related texts published in Health News, an authoritative newspaper affiliated with the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, between 2020 and 2025. Guided by Steen’s [1] four-dimensional model of Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT), the study examines the mechanisms underlying deliberate metaphor in the corpus. The findings indicate that Health News employs several types of deliberate metaphor, most notably competition, journey, and war, which are processed and activated across the dimensions of language, thought, reference, and communication. Future research could extend the analysis to multimodal representations and empirical validation, thereby broadening the scope of health discourse studies.
 
Keyword—health discourse, deliberate metaphor, ageing-related discourse, corpus-based research

Cite: Shuyan Wang and Zhenghao Rong, "A Study of Deliberate Metaphor in Ageing-Related Discourse in Health News," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 179-184, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

 
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