| News discourse from economic newspapers and magazines is the main source for the public to acquire recent economic information.They focus on complex economic phenomena and theories,covering a wide range of topics including securities,finance,economics,companies,banks,bonds,investments and so forth.Some of the economic concepts are so abstract and professional that economic media often use metaphors to conceptualize them.But the metaphors in Chinese and English economic discourses reflect different modes of thinking and cultures,which creates certain barriers to comprehension for cross-lingual readers.On this basis,the thesis aims to deal with the dynamic process of metaphor meaning construction.Namely,how the mental space is formed in the writers’ minds and reflected through the use of metaphors.Conceptual blending theory,proposed by Fauconnier and Turner in 1997,provides a detailed analysis of the cognitive process of metaphor,attempting to explain the cognition behind the dynamic process of meaning construction and providing a broad platform for the interpretation of various complex and novel metaphors.This research attempts to use the theory as a framework and conceptual metaphor as a theoretical basis to conduct a contrastive study of English and Chinese economic metaphors.The English corpus is selected from the Business and Finance & Economy sections of The Economist,and the Chinese corpus is drawn from the Industry & Company and Finance & Capital sections of China Economic Weekly.To make the study more informative,the latest corpus was selected,spanning from 15 January 2021 to 30 September 2021.Forty articles were selected from each section respectively.Two mini-corpora were generated.CNC(China News Corpus)and BNC(British News Corpus).CNC includes 79105 words,and BNC includes 81124 words.The main instrument used for retrieval and data collection was Ant Conc 3.5.9.Through adopting both qualitative and quantitative research methods,this study tries to answer the following three questions:1.What economic metaphors appear in Chinese and English economic discourse,and how are they distributed?2.What is the dynamic process of meaning construction of Chinese and English economic metaphors?3.What are the universality and variation of Chinese and English economic metaphors?And what are the causes of them?The findings are as follows: 1.On the one hand,the major metaphor types in BNC and CNC are same and the yield rates are close.The up-down metaphor has the highest yield rate,followed by human metaphor,war metaphor,journey metaphor,and machine metaphor.On the other hand,other metaphor types have different yield rates.“Contest metaphor” and“weather metaphor” have significantly higher yield rates in CNC.In the BNC,“liquid metaphor” and “building metaphor” have higher yield rates.2.The process of metaphor meaning construction in Chinese and English economic discourse involves two identical steps:first,establishing a connection between the source domain and the economic domain based on similarity;second,projecting the relationship between the two input spaces to the blended space to construct new meaning.In the process of blending,the three stages of “composition”,“completion”,and “elaboration” play important roles.3.BNC and CNC have the same alternative metaphors.Namely,for economic domain,they have similar source domains.Even at the specific semantic level,they also share similar semantic categories.However,traditional culture,historical factors and economic systems generate preferential metaphors and unique metaphors.Through contrasting and analyzing the economic metaphors and their cognitive processes in Chinese and English economic news,the research has significant implications both theoretically and practically. |
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