本研究計畫的目的涵蓋兩個層面，第一，研究者嘗試建立整合量化的語料庫分析及質性的文本論述分析的概念化分析程序或模式；第二，本計畫將以兩個自行建構的語料庫包括：(1)時序橫跨6年（2008-2017）的「台灣和香港總體經濟新聞語料庫」、及(2)時序橫跨10年期間的「台灣基因改造新聞語料庫」作為研究案例，並以隱喻為主題分析「新聞中的隱喻」使用，此一部分研究同時也是作為回應前述第一個研究目的而設置。隱喻分析除了是論述分析的重要環節之外，同時也涉及了使用一個人們熟知的經驗性詞彙（來源域）、去描繪一個抽象或複雜事物及現象（目標域），在此情況下，語料庫分析探索大量文本中的字彙及詞彙使用，就成為分析隱喻的合適方法。然而，新聞文本中的隱喻全然仰賴軟體程式分析無法探詢其背後隱藏的意識型態及潛藏意義，因此需要人文詮釋的協助進行論述分析。本研究計畫因此也一個是立基於跨領域範疇下實證的、理論的、及方法上的研究思考及設計。
Metaphors in the News: Doing media discourse analysis with corpus methods The purpose of this project is two folds. First, it tries to construct a process and model of converging corpus method and discourse analysis. Second, it uses two corpus: 6-years macroeconomic news reports of Taiwan and Hong-Kong and 10-yesrs reports on genetically modified technologies are constructed as the cases to investigate metaphors in news in order to response to the former purpose. Metaphor is defined as unusual usages of adopting one lexical term of thing or object to frame another. Under this circumstance, corpus analysis, a method using software to explore vocabularies of large collection of texts is a proper way for studying metaphorical expressions of news genre. However, I argue that qualitative discourse analysis are necessary for decoding the latent meaning of texts to deconstruct the hidden ideologies embedded in the news genre after the quantitative results yielded by corpus methods. Therefore, this project is a cross-disciplinary research design on the ground of empirical, methodological, and theoretical aspects.
