A Corpus-based Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In The International Economic Periodicals

Metaphor has been studied for a long time,and the traditional view of metaphor sees it as a rhetorical device.The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by the American linguists Lakoff and Johnson,which examined metaphor from a cognitive perspective,argued that metaphor is not just a rhetorical device but a cognitive approach.The theory of conceptual metaphor was a milestone in the study of metaphor,and since then,there have been numerous studies on conceptual metaphor.The use of conceptual metaphors in different discourses,their application in education and politics,etc.,have been analyzed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.However,most of these studies have focused on the use of a particular type of conceptual metaphor,but less on the economic phenomena underlying the metaphors,and few have focused on comparative studies of economic journals and magazines.This paper,therefore,examines conceptual metaphors in The Economist and The Quarterly Journal of Economics,two renowned economic periodicals,in the early2020 s,using the Wmatrix 5.0 as the corpus analysis tool for semantic-tagging and Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory as its theoretical framework.The timing of the corpus was chosen in the early 2020 s to exclude the impact of the COVID-19 on the data.The thesis aims to address the following questions:(1)What are the key semantic domains of in The Economist and The Quarterly Journal of Economics?(2)What source domains and types of conceptual metaphors are applied in the selected semantic domains?(3)What are the similarities and differences in the usage of conceptual metaphors? Furthermore,what are the underlying factors that contribute to such consistency and discrepancy? To answer the questions above,this study employed both corpus-based qualitative and quantitative methods,using the two selfbuilt corpora,namely Corpus of The Economist(CTE)and Corpus of The Quarterly Journal of Economics(CQTJE).After being processed and cleansed by Edit Pad Pro 7,CTE includes sixty-three articles from January to March of 2020,totaling 71,563 words,while CTQJE consists of ten articles from the first quarter of 2020,with87,671 words in total.Then,after the corpora being processed and concordance lines are extracted from the semantics tagged by Wmatrix 5.0,MIPVU is used to manually identify the conceptual metaphors within.The results show that:(1)All three types of metaphors namely,orientational metaphors,ontological metaphors,and structural metaphors as categorized by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),are found within the two corpora,the number of which showed a declining trend.This indicates that both corpora’s focus on the direction of the economy,which corresponds to the fluctuating economic nature.(2)There are sixteen metaphors found in these corpora,with fourteen sharing metaphors.Metaphor HIGH INFLATION IS DOWN is only found in CTE and CALCULATION IS A JOUNREY is exclusive to CTQJE.Also,structural metaphors are used more frequently in CTE than in CTQJE,implying more explanations of economic phenomena are found in CTE.(3)The cultural coherence and embodiment features of conceptual metaphors are the reasons that contributed to CTE and CTQJE’s similarities,while the systematicity of conceptual metaphors and different target readerships caused the divergences between two corpora.