A Cognitive Approach To Novel Metaphor In Economic Discourse

The cognitive linguistics considers metaphor as a basic way of cognition more than just a figure of speech. Metaphor is pervasive in daily life and any scientific fields. There are a lot of metaphors in economic discourse. Previous researches on metaphor focus on conventional metaphor in such discourse but ignore novel metaphor. So in this thesis, the author will choose to study novel metaphors in economic discourse to make up the improvement.Generally speaking, researchers employ Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory to study metaphors in economic discourse. However, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is not suitable to explain novel metaphor while Conceptual Blending Theory has its superiority. It also has some shortcomings: it can not explain why and how this blending process happens, its psychological motivation. According to Relevance Theory, the process of understanding metaphor is an inferential process of establishing the relevance and searching for the optimal relevance. This makes up Conceptual Blending Theory. Relevance Theory is too general, which needs to be formalized by Conceptual Blending Theory. This thesis tries to combine Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory to explain novel metaphors in economic discourse and build up a tentative analytic model: CIT +. The analysis shows that conceptual integration network with seeking optimal relevance can best account for the interpretation of novel metaphors in economic discourse.In this CIT+, the elements in two input spaces connect with counterparts by relevance and only relevant elements can be projected to the blend space. Elements in the blend space are blended in order to seek the optimal relevance and then become the emergent structure. The thesis sets up this model and applies it on samples to prove its feasibility.This thesis will be divided into five chapters. Chapter one is a general introduction about the objectives, rationale, methodology and layout. Chapter two is an overview of previous studies on metaphors. Chapter three will introduce the theoretical basis of this thesis, namely Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory. The author finds that it is possible to give a new model based on the two theories, which is much better to explain metaphors. Based on the theoretical basis, chapter four will focus on the explanation of novel metaphors in the Economist in English. It is a sample analysis. Chapter five is the conclusion. It will make a summary of this thesis, the major findings, limitations and suggestions to the future study.