Corpus-based Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English Economic Discourse

In recent years, the global economy has become one of our most concerns. After reading, the researcher finds out that there are a large number of different metaphors in economic discourses. The object of research in this thesis is the economic discourses collected from British and American mainstream mediums, such as The Economist, Business Week, Yahoo.com, and BBC; and the topics of the economic discourses cover a large range of economic fields, such as foreign trading, stock market, bond trading, bank and real estate, etc.Based on Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory, this thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative method of research to analyze the metaphors in the collected 105 economic discourses. According to different source domains, the metaphors are classified into seven types and the working mechanism and occurrence frequency of each type of metaphors are analyzed in related cognitive linguistic theory. Through the study, the pervasiveness of metaphor in economic domain is verified by the qualitative and quantitative way of research; the spatial metaphor is more frequently used in economic discourses; the mechanism of mapping is systematic; thus the related theories of cognitive linguistics are further developed. In addition, the study further reveals that people’s understanding of abstract concepts depends largely on concrete concepts based on their body experiences; at the same time, the research can give some helps to English learners in understanding the metaphorical expressions in economic discourses.