A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In English And Chinese Financial Reporting

Metaphor is an important research topic that has drawn intellectual pursuits since remote antiquity. The traditional view of metaphor considers metaphor as merely a literary matter, a rhetorical device, a compressed simile, and an ornament of language. However, more and more studies show that metaphor is not only a linguistic metaphor or a decoration of language. Among these studies, a contemporary theory of metaphor– conceptual metaphor– is put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, which is the main concern of this paper.General studies on different kinds of metaphor and contrastive studies of metaphor in different cultures have already been carried out to study the characteristics of different metaphors. But among these contrastive studies, by now there have been not contrastive studies of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic field, which is exactly what this paper will mainly deal with.In this paper, a corpus-based approach is adopted in comparing the conceptual metaphors in Chinese financial reporting (CFR) with those in English financial reporting (EFR). The authentic texts related to economics are chosen from two websites, which are www.cctv.com and www.cnn.com, and the reasons for choosing these texts are based on the standard of implementing a contrastive study and the standard of making comparable the quantity of words in different translated texts. To make a contrastive study, this paper categorizes the conceptual metaphors identified in two corpora into two parts: same conceptual metaphors and different conceptual metaphors, and for the analysis of each conceptual metaphor, linguistic entity, frequency and percentage are taken as the three standards for comparison, which is analyzed with Concapp. After the manual identification, totally twenty-nine conceptual metaphors have been found in two corpora (twenty-five in EFR as compared with twenty-two in CFR). Among these twenty-eight conceptual metaphors, EFR and CFR conceive eighteen same conceptual metaphors. They are: the organism metaphor, the physical movements metaphor, the disaster metaphor, the war metaphor, the gambling metaphor, the game metaphor, the up and down metaphor. And for the different conceptual metaphors, EFR conceives the path metaphor, the progress metaphor, the container metaphor and the animal metaphor, while CFR conceives the show metaphor, the difficulty metaphor, and the temperature metaphor. After all, both EFR and CFR have preference for the up and down metaphor (778 instances and 7 linguistic entities comprising 53.6 % in EFR as compared with 139 instances and 10 linguistic entities comprising 47.8 % in CFR). And for the other conceptual metaphors, the EFR is more likely to conceive the economy as an organism (232 instances and 30 linguistic entities comprising 16%), and the CFR conceiving the market movements as physical movements (112 instances and 14 entities comprising 44.8 %). In conclusion, the EFR yields 496 instances of metaphor in a total size of 51,620 words, or approximately one metaphor every 104 words; and the CFR yields 219 instances of metaphor in a total size of 77,450 words, or approximately one metaphor every 356 words. It shows that in financial reporting, EFR conceives more conceptual metaphors than CFR.This study provides a systematic and comprehensive contrastive study of conceptual metaphor in EFR and CFR, which can help economists, financial experts, translators, ESP students and scholars, who are interested in comparative research on metaphor and economics, to gain a deeper understanding of the economic related abstract concepts.