A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Conceptual Metaphors In Business Discourse

From early years in 1980s, philosophers and cognitive linguists began to notice metaphor study in the filed of cognitive linguistics. Lakoff and Johnson tell us that "most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature". Therefore metaphor has not only been a rhetorical device to decorate expressions, but also has worked as the basic frame for human thinking. In the last few decades, metaphor study has become the hottest area for discussion at home and aboard. However, the contrastive analysis combines with conceptual metaphor theory in our country is still inefficient and underdeveloped, because it has just started its way of exploitation and no frame or system relates to the research has been set. After an examination of the papers in the CNKI China Journal Full-text Database (CJFD), author finds there is nearly no systematic research based on the comparison of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors in business discourse, in which conceptual metaphors are extremely widely used. Therefore, she decided to conduct this contrastive study of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors in business discourse.The purpose of this research is to compare English and Chinese conceptual metaphors in business discourse, find some differences and commonness in major types of conceptual metaphors. The results of the research may offer some help in further understanding of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors in business discourse and the culture that they live in. the learning of second language, also the intercultural communication in terms of business purpose. In this research, the corpus-base approach is adopted to provide data for the comparison of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors from authentic business discourse materials.This thesis has five chapters:Chapter 1 is a general introduction of the blue print of doing this research. Chapter 2 introduces the theoretical background for doing this research. Chapter 3 is the design of this research, includes the methodology, data description and data collection. Chapter 4 is the part of data analysis, findings and discussion. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the whole research.The findings of this research are:1. Metaphor is a universal phenomenon of language. Both English and Chinese conceptual metaphors are widely used in business discourse. The common conceptual metaphors found in business discourse are:BUSINESS IS WAR, BUSINESS IS FLUID, BUSINESS IS SPORT, BUSINESS IS A LIVING CREATURE and so on.2. There is commonness between English and Chinese conceptual metaphors in business discourse. The same cognitive experience shared by all human beings and external world that people live in provide physical basis for the forming of common conceptual metaphors.3. Although conceptual metaphors to a great degree rely on the commonness of human thinking mode, each nation has its own peculiar character for its conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors in business discourse have also carried its national characteristics, and these national characteristics are embodied in the differences of conceptual metaphors in business discourse in different languages.Though a comparison of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors in business discourse has been made, the main results of doing this research have been concluded and the cross-cultural implication has been discussed, there are still some limitations of this research work, however, at least it will also serve as a preliminary trial for the further studv in this field in the future.