The Event Structure Metaphor In English And Chinese Economic Media Discourses

The theory of conceptual metaphor initiated by Lakoff and Johnson in their seminal works Metaphors We Live By views metaphor as a way of thinking or reasoning rather than simply a matter of language. This theory has been applied to the study of metaphor in a variety of disciplines and has brought about lots of fruits. Nevertheless, systematic study of conceptual metaphor in economic media discourse is far from enough. The Event Structure Metaphor, treated as a candidate for metaphor study by Lakoff, is a much more intricate but less studied metaphor. As the world economy, especially the Chinese economy, is developing rapidly, economic discourse is pervasive in newspapers, magazines, journals, etc. Economy is playing a more and more important role in our social life. Therefore, this thesis kicks off a corpus-based analysis of the Event Structure Metaphor in both English and Chinese economic media discourses.The primary objective of the current study is to deepen and enrich the contemporary study of metaphor from the angle of inter-linguistic and inter-cultural investigation. To achieve this objective, a relatively systematic and comparative analysis of the Event Structure Metaphor in English and Chinese economic media discourses is carried out.The thesis is made up of five parts. Apart from the introduction and conclusion parts, it includes three chapters. Chapter 1 is a review of the theory of conceptual metaphor including that of the Event Structure Metaphor, and a review of previous studies on metaphor in economic discourse. Chapter 2 lays out the theoretical framework for this study—the cognitive and cultural assumptions about metaphor. Chapter 3 focuses on a comparative study of the Event Structure Metaphor in Chinese and English economic media discourses including conceptual comparison and formal comparison, trying to figure out their similarities and differences as wellas the cognitive and cultural basis behind them.Generally, the inter-cultural and inter-linguistic comparison combined with qualitative and quantitative analysis featured in this study displays the universality as well as diversity of the Event Structure Metaphor across cultures and languages. On the one hand, English and Chinese share high degree of similarities at the conceptual level of the Event Structure Metaphor, that is, various aspects of event structure, namely, states, changes, causes, actions, purposes, means, and difficulties, are conceptualized in terms of space, motion, and force. On the other hand, they differ quite a lot at the linguistic level, especially in submappings such as CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS, MEANS ARE PATHS TO DESTINATIONS and DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS. The cause of similarities is the common bodily and spatial experience in and with the world. While the causes of the differences are mainly from two aspects: broader cultural context as well as natural and physical environment. Besides, the study also supports various findings of the contemporary theory with regard to the nature, the structure and the grounding of metaphor. In other words, metaphor is a process of conceptualization; each metaphorical mapping is a fixed set of ontological correspondences between entities or their inference patterns in a source domain and those in a target domain; metaphorical mappings are grounded in our bodily experience and daily knowledge. Finally, the current study also contributes, to certain extent, to the multidisciplinary exploration of the relationship between language, culture, and cognition.