A Corpus-based Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Domestic English Economic News Reports

Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory marks a shift of metaphor study from rhetorical view and pragmatic view to cognitive view. A lot of conceptual metaphor studies based on this theory have been conducted ever since then. Meanwhile, economic discourse has been the focus of current empirical studies of metaphor. However, so far, there have not been studies of conceptual metaphor in non-native English economic discourse. Domestic English economic discourse is exactly what the present thesis tries to explore.This paper studies conceptual metaphor in domestic economic discourse, aiming to find out what conceptual metaphors are adopted in domestic English news reports and what keywords are employed by these metaphors. A corpus-based approach is adopted in analyzing the typical conceptual metaphors and keywords employed in domestic economic news reports. The authentic texts to build the corpus are 100 selected English economic news articles from Chinese news website www.chinadaily.cn. A qualitative research based on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory is conducted to pick out conceptual metaphors in the corpus. According to Lakoff's conceptual mapping theory, these metaphors are classified into different categories governed by the source domain of metaphor. All the keywords employed by each conceptual metaphor are listed and illustrated with examples picked from the corpus. The occurrence frequencies of key words of these metaphors are calculated and compared to explore conceptual metaphor key words preference of domestic English news reports. At last, the overall frequencies of different metaphor categories occurring in the corpus are presented.Through this research, 605 metaphors are observed in the corpus of domestic English economic discourse, which verifies the application Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory in non-native economic discourse. Seven categories of conceptual metaphors are found to be frequently employed in domestic economic news, which are JOURNEY, BUILDING, WAR, HUMAN BEING, LIQUID, ORGANISM, and UP-DOWN metaphors. All the keywords employed by conceptual metaphors from the corpus are presented with occurrence frequencies, to certain degree, reflecting the preference of conceptual metaphor keywords in domestic English news reports.