| In 1980,the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s masterpiece,Metaphors We Live By,marks that the metaphor study has entered the new field of cognitive study.In the contemporary theory,metaphor is considered not just as a language phenomenon,but as a matter of thought and a way of cognition.Metaphor is ubiquitous in our daily lives and languages.It is embodied in nature and plays a fundamental role in organizing humans’ conceptual systems.Although cognitive metaphor theory is widely applied in various fields of metaphorical research and has obtained substantial achievements.With the development of technology and the emergence of large-scaled corpora,though approaches to study conceptual metaphor through corpora has been accepted,the research on metaphors in the economic field is relatively rare.Therefore,in this thesis,by means of keyword retrieval,the author intends to collect 2472 terms of“root”and“根”from several Chinese&English authoritative business newspapers(Financial Times,The Economist,The Wall Street Journal,《凤凰财经》,and《财经网》)from 2007 to 2017,and build a corpus,in an effort to classify,calculate,and analyze ROOT metaphors from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.This thesis aims to explore the following three questions:(i)What is the classification and proportion of ROOT metaphors in English and Chinese business news?(ii)What are the mapping scopes of the ROOT metaphors?(iii)What are the similarities and dissimilarities via English and Chinese ROOT metaphors in business news? What are the motivations that result in these phenomena?This paper mainly employs the quantitative,qualitative and comparativeapproaches.After an overall study,the research arrives at the following conclusions:(i)English ROOT metaphors in business news only entail two types of conceptual metaphor with orientational metaphors occupying 69%,ontological metaphors 31%,but with no structural metaphor.While in the Chinese ROOT metaphors,structural metaphors account for 40%,orientational metaphors 51%and ontological metaphors 9%.(ii)The mapping scopes of ROOT metaphors in English and Chinese business news can be summarized into five types of domains: modification,relation,science,behavior,and physiology.(iii)English and Chinese ROOT metaphors share the same expressions from the perspectives of origin,basis,motion,blood relationship,word formation,completeness or elimination,mathematics,and physiological structure.While the major differences convey in the aspects of general distribution,sub-sections of mapping scopes,and lexical expressions.The reasons that contribute to such dissimilarities are the differences in living environment and thinking patterns. |
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