A Cognitive Study Of Metaphor In Economic Discourse

The study of metaphor has been a hot topic for more than 2000 years. It isused to be regarded as a rhetorical device, especially in literature. Later on, I. A.Richards put forward his "Interaction theory", which challenged the earlier views.Since 1970s scholars from such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, semiotics andcognitive science began to turn their attentions to this particular linguisticphenomenon-metaphor. In the 1980s, Lakoff and Johnson developed a new cognitivetheory of metaphor, in which metaphor is argued to be a way of thinking pervadinglanguage, culture, thought and social life. According to this theory, we comprehendabstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning through metaphor. Abstractreasoning is largely governed by metaphorical mappings. We map the experience ofthe source domain onto the target domain. The cognitive theory of metaphor and itsgreater explanatory power offers a new and promising approach to the study ofmetaphors and lays a foundation for further studies.Based on the previous studies, especially on the principles of cognitivelinguistics, this thesis sets out to identify and analyze conceptual metaphors ineconomic discourse. The samples consist of 64 articles taken from the internetpostings of The Economist in the period from 20th October 1990 to 9th September2006. The combination of data description and explanation is used to give empiricalevidence of how various economic activities are conceptualized and presented to thepublic in terms of a number of repeatedly selected source domains which are moreconcrete and which involve more clearly perceived structures.The results show that metaphor is pervasive in the economic discourse as inmany other types of discourse. Economic activities are conceptualized in terms ofeight frequently used conceptual metaphors: ORGANISM metaphor, WARFAREmetaphor, JOURNEY metaphor, NATURAL PHENOMENON metaphor, DAILYNECESSITIES metaphor, MECHANISM metaphor, SPATIAL conceptual metaphorand CONTAINER metaphor. The ideological considerations behind the use of the metaphors are also discussed. The exploration of the ideologies behind the metaphorhelps us understand the metaphorical way of thinking in economic discourse andfacilitate the understanding of free market concept of western economists.