Economic Discourse Coherence: A Conceptual Metaphor Perspective

People have carried out a large amount of research on metaphor from different perspectives since Aristotle. The traditional rhetoric regards metaphor as a rhetoric device. In the past few years since 1970s, metaphor is considered as not only a linguistic phenomenon but a way of thought. Human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, and then conceptual metaphor came into being (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The nature of conceptual metaphor is the cross-domain mapping from source domain to target domain, so we can understand the unknown and the abstract through the known and the concrete. Therefore, conceptual metaphor plays a significant role in our understanding language and describing the world through language. In recent years, people have almost studied every aspect of conceptual metaphor, including its nature, philosophical basis, types, characteristics, and even probed deeply into its function at different levels of language, especially at the discourse level. But few studies have been conducted on the coherent function of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese economic discourses. Therefore, on the basis of the contemporary theory of metaphor, the present study attempts to make a contribution to the coherent function of conceptual metaphors in economic discourses. This study may draw the businessmen's attention to cultivating the metaphorical awareness in reading economic discourses to facilitate business communications. Meanwhile, this paper may give some guidance for the ESP and EFL learning and teaching.This thesis selects 42 economic discourses (21 English and Chinese respectively) from four most authoritative magazines and newspapers in the west and in China, namely, The New York Times, The Economist, China Business, and People's Daily as the object of study. A number of metaphorical expressions are identified from these economic discourses and classified into 9 types of conceptual metaphors according to the source domain, which is followed by the elaborate description of the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese and the statistic analysis of the corpora in terms of quantitative approach. Lastly, qualitative approach is employed to analyze the coherent function of conceptual metaphors through analyzing two specific economic discourses on the basis of the contemporary theory of metaphor. This study concludes as follows: first, owing to the common bodily experiences of human being, the conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese economic discourses have considerable similarities. Therefore, many metaphorical expressions with different forms can formulate the same conceptual metaphor. Second, the frequencies of occurrences of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese economic discourses are different. The frequency of occurrence of UP/DOWN SPACE metaphor is most dominant, contributing 27.16% of all metaphorical expressions. Coming second and third are HUMAN BEING and WAR metaphors with the percentages of 15.48 and 10.86 respectively, and the lowest one is GAME/RACE metaphor with the percentage of 4.61. This has something to do with their relation to the bodily experiences of human being. Space is very important for human being because almost every activity of human is conducted in the space. The cognitive competence of human being initially originates from their perception of space which constructs many other abstract concepts. However, game and race are only special activities for human being, so the metaphorical expressions of GAME/RACE metaphor are comparatively small. Third, the frequency of the same type of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic discourses has its similarities and differences. The frequencies of metaphors of UP/DOWN SPACE, HUMAN BEING and GAME/RACE in English and Chinese are quite similar. However, the frequencies of metaphors of WAR, MACHINE, LIQUID, CONTAINER and BUILDING in the Chinese corpus are much higher than that in English while JOURNEY metaphor occurs more frequently in English. This is a typical manifestation of the differences between Chinese and Western cultures in economic discourses. Fourth, although the instantiation of metaphors may present some cultural-specific features, the coherent function of conceptual metaphors is pervasive in both kinds of economic discourses. Through the analysis of two specific economic discourses (each for English and Chinese), we find that governed by the conceptual metaphors, the metaphorical expressions systematically emerge in groups, interact with each other, and form the cohesive network in the discourse, which makes a great contribution to the coherence of economic discourses.