A Contrastive Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphor In Chinese And English Economic Analysis Discourse

Rhetoricians traditionally regard metaphor as a rhetoric device which is independent of human cognition. Contrary to the traditional view, Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is in fact a matter of action and thought. They conclude that metaphor is a basic human way of thinking or cognitive process and is pervasive throughout everyday language structuring not only how we talk, but also how we think and act and that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. Cameron and Low contend that metaphor is universal and may take on different forms and functions. Large numbers of commonly used metaphorical expressions are evidence of concepts underlying our everyday understanding of events and experiences. Therefore, the importance of metaphor to human language and cognition cannot be over emphasized.Since conceptual metaphor is closely based on our physical and cultural experience, it follows that different cultures may have different interpretations of conceptual metaphor. Following Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive theory, the present thesis aims to extend the contemporary study of metaphor to the analysis of Chinese and English economic analysis discourses. The data collected come from mainstream Chinese and English financial magazines, such as the Finance & Economics, the Economic Observer, the Business Week and the Financial Times. Adopting both quantitative and empirical methods, we categorize conceptual metaphors appearing in the corpus into nine different kinds with a view to studying the similar and different manifestations of metaphors. Through the comparative study, we find that Chinese and English share most of the conceptual metaphors; however, there are still subtle differences at the linguistic level. The similarity is mainly due to common physical experience and perception of the world and the differences lie in the respective cultural specifications.