A Cognitive Approach To Conceptual Metaphors In Stock Terms

Metaphor is a traditional topic for poetry, rhetoric and literary studies. The history of study on metaphor can be traced back to as early as Aristotle, a prominent ancient Greek philosopher two thousand years ago. In recent years, metaphor has attracted the increasing and considerable attention of philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and is generally considered as a testing ground for theories of meaning in particular and theories of language comprehension in general. Studies on metaphor from various perspectives show that metaphor plays a significant role in human thought and social activities. The publication of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By in 1980 marks the real beginning of the cognitive linguistics. Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is not only a matter of language, but also a matter of human thought.Metaphor, as a basic cognitive instrument, is omnipresent in human language. It exists not only in the literary works, but also in other various disciplines and fields. For example, stock area is flooded with metaphors. With the increasing acceleration of globalization of economy, people's life becomes more and more closely associated with the economic activities. Consequently, stock terms are getting familiar to ordinary people. Nevertheless, comprehensive and systematic studies on conceptual metaphors in stock terms are far from enough, let alone the discussion from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. This thesis intends to make an analysis of conceptual metaphors in stock terms from the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective by adopting the conceptual metaphor theory within the framework of cognitive linguistics.The thesis firstly reviews the development history of metaphor studies and elaborates the philosophical basis, the cognitive basis and the working mechanism of conceptual metaphor theory. Then, by adopting the qualitative method, the author collects adequate conceptual metaphors and metaphorical expressions concerning stocks from authoritative security investment dictionaries, journals, magazines, stock exchange reports, web pages and movie scripts. In accordance with the characteristics of their source domains, the data are categorized into Human Being Metaphor, Animal Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Color Metaphor, Cooking & Food Metaphor, Motion Metaphor, Love Metaphor, Game Metaphor and War Metaphor. After the classification, typical examples are given a detailed analysis from the cognitive perspective which includes the description and the interpretation of the sampled stock metaphors. Findings and conclusions yielded in this study are as follows:1. The abundance of conceptual metaphors and metaphorical expressions in stock area serves as evidence for supporting the pervasiveness of metaphor.2. All the conceptual metaphors fall into categories distinguished by Lakoff and Johnson. The nine types of stock metaphors listed in this thesis are Human Being Metaphor, Animal Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Color Metaphor, Cooking & Food Metaphor, Motion Metaphor, Love Metaphor, Game Metaphor and War Metaphor. Among which, Human Being Metaphor, Animal Metaphor, Building Metaphor, Color Metaphor and Cooking & Food Metaphor can be categorized under ontological metaphors; Motion Metaphor falls into the orientational metaphors; Love Metaphor, Game Metaphor and War Metaphor belong to the category of structural metaphors.3. The present study proves that metaphor, as a basic cognitive instrument, plays a significant role in coining, describing and comprehending the concepts of stock.4. Cases of Animal Metaphor and Color Metaphor in English and Chinese stock terms prove that conceptual metaphors are characterized not only by cognitive universality but also by cultural relativity due to the influence of different cultural background and social habits.The present study has three pedagogical implications. Firstly, the study of conceptual metaphors in stock terms from a cognitive perspective offers an alternative choice for the teaching and learning linguistics. Secondly, the present study broadens the scope of language study, which can make us better understand the nature of language from a new perspective. Thirdly, the study enriches the research findings of sociolinguistics because stock is closely associated with society and language.