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A Comparative Study On Metaphor In Chinese And American Economic Reports From The Pragma-cognitive Stylistic Perspective

Posted on:2019-06-23Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:H M ShaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2405330596450338Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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Studies on metaphor developing from Aristotle's rhetoric theory to Lakoff'conceptual metaphor theory mark a cognitive shift.In the past,most researches on metaphor mainly focused on daily metaphors and conventional metaphors from the perspective of linguistics.There were not abundant researches analyzing styles of metaphor.Along with the development of formalist stylistics and functional stylistics,there appeared a cognitive shift in stylistics and cognitive stylistic study on metaphor emerged.However,the major issues within stylistics such as deviation,prominence and foregrounding are also related to pragmatic principles.Therefore,this thesis tries to combine cognitive stylistics with pragmatics to study metaphor.Under the theoretical guidance of pragma-cognitive stylistics and the approach of corpus-linguistics,with comparative analysis and the aid of Wmatrix and Hyconc,this thesis studies the two questions:(1)What are the deviation,prominence,foregrounding caused by metaphors in the Chinese and American economic discourses? What are their stylistic features and stylistic effects ?(2)What stylistic values as well as cultural values can be revealed from their different stylistic features.The findings are as follows:(1)The qualitative and quantitative deviations of metaphors in both corpora are alike in spite of some minor differences.The same point is that organism metaphor and travel metaphor rank the top two in both corpora,which endows the business selling texts with some practical and daily stylistic features.The different features lie in environment metaphor,war metaphor and building metaphor that occupy much higher proportions in Chinese corpus,which respectively endows the selling discourses with features of literary styles,military styles and scientific styles,while in American corpus,food metaphor is significantly higher in proportion,giving it features of daily styles.Organism metaphor and travel metaphor in both corpora can achieve the most cognitive effects with the least efforts.And war metaphor in Chinese corpus and food metaphor in American corpus require more cognitive processing to achieve the cognitive effects.(2)Stylistic values can be achieved by social judgement and aesthetic appraisal.In Chinese corpus,the appraisal use of burden metaphor,metaphors indicating problem-solving abilities as well as metaphors concerning aesthetics indicates the stylistic values that Chinese have positive attitudes and always work hard to solve selling problems when selling problems occurs,while in American corpus,the use of forward metaphor and metaphors indicating great efforts leads readers to interpret that American have strong selling abilities and are always active to push forward selling activities,achieving the stylistic values of promoting sales.As for cultural values,human beings are often seen as organized and disciplinary community,thus highlighting the collectivism in China while plants tend to live independently,manifesting American as individualism.The burden metaphor in Chinese travel metaphor shows that Chinese are more inclined to show stronger avoidance of uncertainty in dealing with economic problems.However,forward metaphor in American corpus indicates that American like challenging themselves and are willing to meet uncertain factors in economic activities.War metaphor in Chinese corpus indicates the enhancement of cultural competitiveness towards increasingly fierce economic world and shows strong masculinity features while Chinese environment metaphor “cao” implies feminine features.These two features work together to form a harmonious value system of a balance between Yin and Yang.Foundation metaphor in building metaphor in Chinese corpus indicates the long-term trait of Chinese culture.The thesis studies the styles of metaphor from an integrated perspective of pragmatic stylistics and cognitive stylistics.By revealing the cultural value of metaphors,this thesis sheds light on both the writing and reading of economic discourses from an intercultural perspective.
Keywords/Search Tags:pragma-cognitive styles of metaphor, stylistic features, stylistic effects, stylistic values, cultural values
PDF Full Text Request
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