A Cross-cultural Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Economic Discourse

Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a kind of figure of speech and a matter of special and extraordinary language employed primarily in poetry. It is primarily decorative and ornamental in nature. However, the cognitive linguistic view holds that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. In this sense, metaphor is not merely a figure of speech, but an important means of understanding the world and an essential way of conceptualizing experience. Conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, as an important concept in cognitive linguistics, allows us to understand a relatively complicated and abstract concept in terms of a more familiar and concrete concept.Following the conceptual metaphor theory, the intention of this thesis is to extend the study of metaphors to the economic discourse. This thesis adopts a qualitative and synchronic comparative study method to make a cross-cultural study on conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese economic discourse. The English examples are taken from the magazine Economist, the newspaper The Wall Street Journal, and the journal Business Week in the year 2006, and the Chinese examples are collected from Financial Times (财经时报) and Economic Observation (经济观察报) in the year 2006. Firstly, the collected examples are classified into five kinds of commonly used conceptual metaphors: the JOURNEY metaphor, the HUMAN BEING metaphor, the PERCEPTION metaphor, the WAR metaphor, and the ANIMAL metaphor. The classification demonstrates the abstract concepts in both English and Chinese economic discourse are understood by the cross-domain mapping, which is from the concrete and physical onto the abstract and nonphysical. Secondly, metaphorical mapping process and metaphorical expressions of each type are illustrated, which illuminates that metaphorical concepts in the economic domain are systematic. Then, this thesis makes bilingual comparisons so as to find some cross-cultural evidence supporting the universal and cultural-specific hypotheses about conceptual metaphor.One innovation of the study is proving the systematicity of conceptual metaphor system by illustrating the mapping process and metaphorical expressions of each conceptual metaphor. The other is the exploration of the cognitive universality and cultural relativity by comparing the counterpart metaphorical expressions between English and Chinese. This systematic study may make the reading comprehension to the economic discourse become much easier, and give a theoretical insight into foreign language learning and business negotiation.This study also has its limitations. The subjectivity is unavoidable with a qualitative method and the scope of this thesis and range of the data may not be wide enough. The study of metaphors in economic discourses can be expanded into specific sub-fields such as marketing, finance, management, etc. We can also deepen our research in economic reading, writing, translation and business negotiation by the comparative study of conceptual systems between English and Chinese.