| The theory of conceptual metaphors initiated by G..Lakoff and M. Johnson in theirseminal work Metaphors We Live by views metaphors as way of thinking andreasoning rather than widely used rhetoric devices.It is based on the cognitive theory of metaphor as the main theoretical frameworkthat this study is conducted.The study of business negotiation mainly focused on thenegotiation strategies, few people paid attention to the metaphor in businessnegotiation discourse so far. Therefore, the thesis focused on a relatively systematicand comprehensive analysis of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese businessnegotiation discourses. The author started with the identification of metaphoricalexpressions both in English and Chinese business negotiation discourses, thenclassified the metaphorical expressions into types and distinguished the metaphors inEnglish and Chinese negotiation discourses, finally the author gave some implicationsand advices to International Business Negotiation teaching.Qualitative research method was adopted in this study. The data used in this thesiswere collected from ten business negotiation English books and ten Chinese books.534metaphorical expressions were found, including285Chinese expressions and249English expressions. Nine typical types were found in all according to the sourcedomain: WAR metaphors, JOURNEY metaphors, FOOD metaphors, PERSONmetaphors, BUILDING metaphors, CONTAINER metaphors, DRAMA metaphors,CHESS metaphors and RELIGION metaphors.The similarities and differences have been summarized from comparative analysisof these typical types. Firstly, six typical types have been found out from both Chineseand English collected data，which indicate that Chinese people and people inEnglish-speaking countries have similar physical structure and direct physicalexperience. Secondly, both English and Chinese have their own specific metaphortypes in business negotiation discourses. Drama and Chess metaphors are unique to collected Chinese data, Religion metaphor was found in collected English data only.This indicates that the cultural values of a society could be expressed throughmetaphorical expressions. Even in the same shared typical metaphor type, culturaldifferences between China and English-speaking countries are reflected.Finally, this thesis proposed different teaching strategies in terms of similarities anddifferences with the hope to help teaching in International Business Negotiation. |
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