The Coherent Function Of Conceptual Metaphor In Chinese And English Economic Discourses

People's interest in the exploration of metaphor started with Aristotle and large amounts of research can be found everywhere.The traditional view regards metaphor as a rhetorical device.However in the 1970s,people began to look at it from an unconventional perspective and researched into it within different fields. Metaphor was then conceived as one of the chief cognitive structures,or a tool for reasoning and thinking,by which we understand the unknown and the abstract through the known or the concrete.It plays an important role in our understanding of language and the world we describe through language.Recently,the study of conceptual metaphor has been quite fruitful.People not only systematically explored its nature,category,characteristic and philosophical basis,but also studied its functions at various levels,especially at the discourse level. However,comparatively few studies have been carried out on the coherent function of conceptual metaphor in Chinese and English economic discourses.Therefore,the present research is intended to fill up this blank.While illustrating the metaphorical differences and similarities between English and Chinese economic discourses,this paper tries to prove the universality of the coherent function of conceptual metaphor in economic discourses of the two languages from different perspectives,though the instantiation of metaphor may present some cultural specific features.The research data in this paper are all authentic economic news reports including 50 English discourses and 50 Chinese discourses.With a qualitative and quantitative method of linguistic analysis,the contrastive analyses between English and Chinese economic metaphors are carded out in terms of different kinds of conceptual metaphors after a comprehensive study of all the discourses selected. Meanwhile,the qualitative method of linguistic analysis is employed to investigate 3 English and Chinese discourses respectively.The coherent function of conceptual metaphor of each category at the discourse level is systematically analyzed from the functional grammar perspective and the cognitive linguistics perspective.The correspondent contrastive analyses may present clear pictures on how conceptual metaphor functions to develop coherent economic discourses in the two languages.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction to some basic issues concerning this study,covering the research background,objective and the organization of this thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review,which starts with a brief retrospect of metaphor research development,followed by an introduction to Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory,including the nature,philosophical basis, category,and the characteristics of metaphor.Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the body of this thesis.Chapter Three deals with the research method,including data collection,and research procedures.Chapter 4 covers all the detailed analyses of this paper,which consists of two parts.Part one adopts the method of contrastive analysis, with the predominant conceptual metaphor of the discourse as the contrastive object, to illustrate the metaphorical differences and similarities between the economic discourses of the two languages.In the second part,the present researcher testifies the universality of the coherent function of conceptual metaphor in economic discourses of the two languages through a contrastive investigation on the sampled discourses, which have been analyzed from perspectives of functional grammar and cognitive linguistics.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis.Limitations of the research are discussed and suggestions for further study are also put forward in this section.