A Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Economic Discourse

Metaphor has always been a hot topic of linguistics. The traditional view on metaphor regards it as a matter of language, while the contemporary view on metaphor looks on it as a tool of thinking or reasoning rather than a linguistic phenomenon. With the application of conceptual metaphor theory, many achievements have been made in linguistics. Nevertheless, systematic studies of conceptual metaphors in economic discourse are far from enough. As Chinese economy grows very fast, written text has already taken part in every aspect of economic activities. This thesis focuses its study on economic news reports on business journals, newspapers and program scripts. Totally, 149 English and Chinese samples are cited from articles that clearly dealt with economic topics, covering a wide range of finance, trade, management and marketing.Adopting a qualitative method of linguistic analysis and a method of contrast, this thesis is to achieve two goals. The first one is to identify four categories of conventional conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese business reports and the types of metaphorical mappings under each category. The second one is to examine the cross-linguistic similarities and differences in these mappings from a synchronic perspective. The thesis differs from similar studies of others in that it extends the study of conceptual metaphor into a special area—the economic discourse and provides a systematic account of the cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the metaphorical mapping in this area.As to the organization of the thesis, after reviewing the development of metaphorical research, the thesis elaborates some major viewpoints of the conceptual metaphor theory. It distinguishes the difference between"conceptual metaphor" and "metaphorical expression", classifies the conceptual metaphor into three main types: orientational metaphor, ontological metaphor and structural metaphor, and discusses its two prominent features, that is, systematicity and cultural coherence. Then, the thesis sets out to analyze the four categories of conceptual metaphors extracted from English and Chinese business reports: the UP-DOWN metaphor, the JOURNEY metaphor, the HUMAN BEING metaphor, and the WARFARE metaphor. The analysis is followed by a contrastive study of the above-mentioned conceptual metaphors in the two languages. Finally, the thesis ends with an overview of the main results and the issues remaining for future exploration.The research has provided us with the following theoretical findings: ( I ) The data provide added support to the idea that the experience of more abstract or less intersubjectively available domains of experience are structured largely by metaphors. The analysis has shown a few metaphorical models to be quite pervasive in both English and Chinese business reports, providing the structure for a vast array of target concepts(II) The study reveals that English and Chinese show a high degree of similarity in the basic metaphorical mapping under the four categories of metaphor, which reflect that conceptual metaphors are not arbitrary, but are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience among all nations.(III) Cultural diversity reveals itself in the specification of the source domain structure and the instantiation of the metaphorical mapping. For example, both English and Chinese use color words to portray economic phenomena, but their preferences for color are varied. Another example is that both English and Chinese use what is eaten to structure what is gotten, but the kinds of food that are especially popular and chosen as the source domain for mapping are different.In conclusion, like those in daily language, conceptual metaphors in...