A Cognitive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In English Financial Reports

The study of metaphor has a long history of thousands of years.Traditionally, metaphor has been invariably regarded as a pure linguistic phenomenon.The traditional views of metaphor were completely overturned when Lakoff and his colleagues put forward their new theory of metaphor from cognitive perspective.The new theory emphasizes the core characteristics communication and cognition of the language;it claims that metaphor is a kind of thinking or conceptualization.Ever since then,emerging from the line of Lakoff's theory are abundant studies of conceptual metaphors in various discourses.Recently,business discourses seem to have attracted the attention of many scholars in the circle cognitive linguistics,they have made their own contributions from different perspectives in this field.Based on the theory of Lakoff and his followers on metaphors and the fruits of previous researches on this topic,the present thesis studies the conceptual metaphors in financial reports of 2008 published in China.By means of qualitative and quantitative analysis,the thesis aims to find out the typical metaphors employed in the financial reports and the potential ideologies conveyed by these metaphors in the financial context.It is found that conceptual metaphors are ubiquitous in English financial reports published in China,in other words,Chinese financial reporters tend to use a considerable amount of conceptual metaphors to embody these financial terms from abstract to concrete in meaning.Thus,six major conceptual metaphors are identified in the financial reports,they include:BUILDING,JOURNEYS,HUMAN BEING,WAR,UP and DOWN,LIQUID.The quantitative analysis of these metaphors finds that there are distinct differences in the frequency of these conceptual metaphors.And the differences in the frequency of these metaphors suggest different cognitive effects in financial reports. For instance,UP and DOWN metaphors make up the largest part of all metaphors specific to the financial reports,and they in general communicate a negative evaluation of the economy.Similarly,we can trace all the different hidden ideologies from different conceptual metaphors and thus get a general impression of the cognitive functions of the conceptual metaphors.