A Cognitive Study Of The Conceptual Metaphors In Business English News

The interest in metaphor and the study of its structure, mechanism, function, and cognitive nature have developed rapidly in the past few decades.Enlightened by the studies on metaphor, this thesis conducts a cognitive study of the conceptual metaphor in business English news which is catching more and more attention because of the development of business and mass communication.The author aims to uncover the conceptual metaphors in business English news by exploring the following questions: 1) What are the typical conceptual metaphors in business English news? 2) How do these metaphors realize their mapping processes from source domain to target domain? 3) What are the implications of the present study? To answer the above research questions, I investigate the relevant conceptual metaphors through a general study and some case studies.The results of my general study show that in business English news, there are eight typical conceptual metaphors. Among them, Business as WAR is the most frequent one in occurrences, followed by conceptual metaphors of Business as Plant, Business as Machine, and Business as Person.The case studies reveal that the mapping processes of conceptual metaphors consist of four steps: the entity of the source domain mapped onto the target domain;then the relationship and feature of the source domain;and then the inference patterns of the source domain.The findings in the study can be applied to English language teaching, especially business English news or economics teaching.