Conceptual Metaphor In English Economic Discourse Under The Background Of Financial Crisis

The metaphor study could be traced back to the Aristotle's Age two thousands years ago. It has been treated as a device of the poetic imagination and the deviation of literal language for a long time. All the traditional studies of metaphor including Aristotle's comparison theory. Quintillian's substitution theory and Richard and Black's interaction theory view metaphor as a figure of speech and an ornamental device in rhetoric. However, the rising of the cognitive linguistics has brought a new challenge to the traditional linguistics. The publication of Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson is a turning point of the metaphor study from rhetorical and semantic study to the cognitive study and opens a new page of the contemporary metaphor study. They formulate the systematic conceptual metaphor theory on the research of the nature, definition, working mechanism, philosophical basis, cognitive basis and classification, which brings a metaphorical revolution in the academic field. Metaphor is not only a rhetorical way of language but also a way of thinking, a conceptual system of thought and action we live by, and a cross mapping process from the source domain to the target domain.In the era of the economic globalization, economic relations between the countries are increasingly linked. The 2008 global financial crisis led to a great deal of collapse of many large financial organizations and corporations and fierce turbulence in the financial market. People become more and more concerned with the financial information. But the economic activities and phenomenon are abstract and complicated. To increase the readers'interests in reading the profound economic contents and have a better understanding of them, the news writers have to use a great number of metaphors. Therefore, a cognitive study of metaphor in the economic discourse is very necessary for people's clearer understanding of the economic information and the economic state.Following the conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework, this thesis adopts both the qualitative approach and quantitative approach to make a cognitive analysis of the conceptual metaphor in English economic discourse under the background of the financial crisis. To achieve the objective, this study wants to answer the following questions:(1) How the mainly researched metaphors such as the journey metaphor, the war metaphor, the human being metaphor, the building metaphor, the liquid metaphor and the up-down metaphor are conceptualized in the economic discourse? (2) What are the popular metaphor expressions and the frequency of their occurrence? (3)What are the typical features of these conceptual metaphors in the economic discourse under the background of financial crisis?For a convincing research, data collection is of vital importance. Firstly, the 100 English economic discourses about the financial crisis collected in the thesis derive from the economic journal of The Economist in the period from September to December of 2008 when the financial crisis was most severe. All the economic discourses are selected from the column of Finance & Economics about the world economy under the financial crisis including business, finance, industries, the stock exchange market, insurance and investments. Then, according to the criteria of metaphor identification applied in this study,1875 samples are identified from the 100 economic discourses and classified into the six types conceptual metaphors according to the different source domain. They are the war metaphor, the journey metaphor, the building metaphor, the human being metaphor, the liquid metaphor and the up-down metaphor. After the data collection and data classification, a qualitative study is applied in exemplifying and analyzing the above-mentioned six types of conceptual metaphors in the economic discourse. Then the quantitative analysis is employed to measure the frequency of the six different sorts of conceptual metaphors in the corpus and conclude the characteristics of these conceptual metaphors in the economic discourse under the background of the financial crisis.The study shows that conceptual metaphors in the economic discourse do not only prove the pervasiveness but also the systematicity. Among the six types conceptual metaphors, the highest frequency is the up/down metaphor accounting for 32% of the total data and is followed by the journey metaphor, the human being metaphor, the war metaphor, the building metaphor and the liquid metaphor. Different sorts of conceptual metaphors highlight different aspects of the economic domain, the characteristics of the conceptual metaphor in the economic discourse under the background of financial crisis are concluded as follows through the statistic analysis. In the up/down metaphor, the down metaphorical expressions are more than the up ones which shows a bad state of the economy for "DOWN IS BAD" in the thoughts of the people. In the journey metaphor, the highest frequency is the air journey which declares the sharp fluctuations of the price and market in the financial crisis. The metaphorical expressions of the health occur mostly in the human being metaphor. That is to say, the health state of the economy and the market is the primary focus of the people. In the war metaphor, the metaphorical expressions of the war results are widely used, especially the negative results accounting for the majority. The building metaphor emphasizes the structure of the economy, company and economic organizations and the liquid metaphor highlights the liquidity of the capital and market. The study embodies the research of the conceptual metaphor and provides a new perspective for the conceptual metaphor in the economic discourse. It will not only help people understand the abstract economic phenomena and fierce economic situation, but also improve the reading ability of English financial news and have a good communication with western business people.