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Public legal education (PLE), a recently developed international practice, is used to
describe a variety of services that are aimed at creating legal literacy among the general
public through different innovative methods that are able to reach their understanding.
With the increasing telecom fraud cases in China, anti-fraud PLE is being conducted in
a widespread way to raise people’s awareness to precaution against telecom fraud.
Especially, news media play an increasingly pivotal role in PLE, as they can seamless
integrate legal education into the public’s daily life, thus enhancing the effectiveness of
PLE. Corpus-based approach to researching metaphor has been applied to various types
of courses, but little attention has been paid to the metaphor use in the PLE discourse.
Therefore, the present corpus-based study will focus on PLE news discourse and
attempt to investigate empirically what kind of conceptual mappings and metaphorical
expressions are utilized in Chinese anti-fraud news. By searching the target words such
as 诈骗(fraud), 骗子(fraudster), 受害者(victim), 警察(police), the database consists
of 3000 concordance lines that were extracted from the Corpus of Telecom Fraud
Discourse (CTFD). Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) and MIP
(Pragglejaz, 2007) were employed in the identification, explanation and interpretation
of metaphors. The data analysis reveals that several metaphors, i.e. PHYSICAL
OBJECT, CONFLICT, BODY, JOURNEY, DISASTER, ANIMAL, prove especially
productive. Results show that the metaphors employed have positive or negative
connotations in the description of different groups in anti-fraud discourse, i.e. positive
connotation towards police and social community committed to combating fraud and
negative connotation towards fraudsters and some of victims. Police are shaped as
respectable, powerful, authoritative and dedicated, which reflects their definitely high
status and positive image in China. By contrast, fraudsters are portrayed as foxy, evil,
and money-hungry and victims are represented as also money-hungry as well as
careless, and regretful, which alerts the readers not to fall into the trap of telecom fraud
and become the victim. The analysis deeply reveals the persuasive, evaluative and
educational role of metaphors in PLE, which strengthens the efficiency of PLE.
Besides, metaphors also help disseminate the fraud-related knowledge as they make
PLE more accessible and understandable. The study enriches the explorations of
metaphor in different genres and emphasizes the importance of metaphor in PLE
discourses. Meanwhile, it offers some insights into the future writing of this genre for
promoting the PLE in China.