Abstract

Drawing upon Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this study investigates the metaphorical patterns through which Chinese primary and secondary school teachers express work-related distress in online complaint discourse. A dataset of 30 complaint posts was collected from Xiaohongshu (Rednote), a leading Chinese social media platform where teachers anonymously share work frustrations. Using the Metaphor Identification Procedure, 126 metaphorical expressions were identified and categorized by source domain. The analysis reveals five dominant source domains through which teachers structure their professional distress: CONFINEMENT/PRISON, DEHUMANIZATION/INSTRUMENTALIZATION, RESOURCE DEPLETION, PERFORMANCE/THEATRE, and JOURNEY/PATH, alongside a subverted ORGANISM/CULTIVATION domain that reconfigures the conventional teacher-as-gardener metaphor. These findings suggest that teachers’ occupational distress, as expressed in complaint discourse, is metaphorically structured as a cluster of interrelated experiences: confinement, degradation, depletion, inauthenticity, and blocked progress, rather than as a single undifferentiated state. The study contributes to understanding how a specific professional community cognitively frames negative emotional experiences in informal digital spaces, and demonstrates the potential of metaphor analysis as a tool for exploring teacher wellbeing from a language-based perspective.

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