| Discourses are produced to represent the world. However, the representation is not always objective reflection of the "reality". The size and nature of the represented information are manipulated to reveal specific views of the producers in power and influence receivers'perception of the event concerned. Owing to its cross-domain conceptual and selective projection, interaction with other cognitive factors in its use and understanding, and its implicitly evaluative functions, metaphor is particularly involved in this function of representation.A large amount of literature about metaphorical representation links the study of metaphor in discourse with understanding of something very central to human behavior, including the relationship between language and ideology in various political worlds, and the perception of specific domains within the socio-economic world. It is especially useful in exploration of the inner subjectivity of journalists of popular business discourse. Most of the existing studies in this field are carried out in the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which has contributed to the emergence of the fairly new approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). However, its total reliance on Lakoff and Johnson's theory is so determinative and it ignores that discourse could guide us to both novel and conventional conceptual metaphors. In addition, the interface between cognitive processes as well as representations in discourse on the one hand and the social groups on the other hand is not constructed clearly enough to refute the criticism of over-interpretation. Practically, few studies concern economic events in fast developing countries, such as China, which is the region outside of the First World.The present research establishes an integrated framework on the basis of metaphor studies in cognitive linguistics and CDA, especially the socio-cognitive approach developed by van Dijk. This proposed framework regards metaphor as both conceptual and linguistic phenomena that work as interface not only between the mental model and ideological structure dominating it, but also between discourse and its metaphoric realizations in text. The research is set in the case of a concrete business issue---Olympic Economy in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. As a fast-developing socialist country with a mixed economic system, China was put under the spotlight of the world thanks to the coming international sports event. This dissertation intends to test the hypothesis that Olympics-related economic activities will witness the integration of and clash between different economic ideologies by carrying out a comparative study of metaphorical representations of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Economy between Chinese and American media. For this purpose, two separate small size corpora were established on the basis of data collected from one authentic business magazine and one broadsheet newspaper in China and the United States respectively within the time range from September 1,2001 to December 31,2008. The relation between various aspects of the target domain and a set of source domains was established and special attention was given to realizations and functions of conceptual scenarios within each conceptual domain and some conceptual blending.The results indicate that the two media share common mental model of Olympic Economy. Their developmental and competitive models of this international business event are realized by predominant metaphorical patterns---LIVING ORGANISM, JOURNEY, SPORT and GAME and WAR metaphors that are drawn from concepts concerning intra-phenomena of the human being, mainly the physical, mental and emotional states of individuals and the inter-phenomena of human beings, mainly their social experiences, including war, sport and game and journey. These similarities reveal their common thinking of Olympic Economy as a fierce and open competition between opposite sides, requiring patience, strategies, hard work and sacrifice. The compatibility of these two models highlights the contribution of competition in Olympic Economy to the development of the entities concerned. This is largely decided by the nature of Olympic Economy as an international sports business with mature mechanism and to some extent shows the effect of China's integration with the international market in its process of modernization, which is marked by the frequent presence of those metaphors adhering to free-market ideology.However, diverse conceptual scenarios activated by lexical choices within the same conceptual domain, different or even particular metaphorical patterns for the same entity or event and different functions of the same metaphorical pattern or scenario reveal differences in their mental models and their different views on participants and events. A more complicated competitive model is created by Chinese media to imply the juxtaposition of challenges and opportunities for local economy. Different views on China's economy as well as the political and economic significance of Beijing Olympics for China lead to different developmental models between the two media. In addition, different economic ideologies, plus cultural elements drive them to consider participants differently. All in all, American media give more space to critical voice in metaphorical representations of various aspects of Olympic Economy, indicating its negative evaluation of the competitiveness of Chinese companies, megaprojects and problems caused by the fast development of China's economy. Differently, Chinese media construct optimistic images in linking economic events with the political and social background in China. It also associates the current situation with companies'development in the future and attempts to tone down the current problems.This research demonstrates the vital role linguistic analyses play in the revelation of metaphor functions, but we need to look further into societal structure, including historical, cultural, as well as political factors and economic ideologies in order to give full explanation. Historical and cultural factors facilitate the understanding of implied meaning, embedded evaluation and emotional effect of a metaphor. The political factors justify the salience of the positive tone in Chinese media and its obscurity in the representation of troubles. Dominance of free-market ideology in American society and the mixture of free-market and socialist ideologies in China also give rise to their diverse thinking of Olympic Economy, which in turn reinforce their ideologies and influence the opinions of the readers and their perception of business activities relating to Beijing Olympics.The findings support some basic ideas about metaphor, including its experiential motivation, conceptual and ideological nature and simultaneously demonstrate its function in exposing covert meanings in language use. Most importantly, this study enriches social-cognitive research under the paradigm of CDA. The study of metaphor as ideologically tainted language further blurs the boundary between conventional and novel metaphors, both of which can reveal the users'specific perspective to think of entities and events. Even one-shot metaphors with quite low frequency could perform the similar function and thus warn against the total dependence on statistics in the analysis of metaphorical representations. The comparative method adopted in the research clearly foregrounds underlying ideologies that nurture the diversity of metaphor use across different countries and thus advocates the idea that disparity across societies should be taken into account in the study of discourse in contemporary world. As a cognitively robust study in the paradigm of CDA, the present research enhances the belief that media discourse, including popular business discourse, is not always complete and neutral representation of the reality, but an effective channel to manipulate the public's understanding of significant events, such as Beijing Olympics and related business activities.
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