Conceptual Metaphors In English Economic News From The Perspective Of Iconicity

In traditional metaphor theory, the metaphor was regarded as a kind of rhetoric. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson jointly released the book Metaphors We Live By, which was of great importance to the later studies on metaphor. This book emphasizes the important role of the people's experience and cognitive ability in semantic interpretation. It points out that human cognitive structure of metaphor is the foundation of human language, and the foundation the emergence and development of culture. When it was published, the study of metaphor went into a new era. Henceforth metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a way of thinking. In 1994, Lin Shuwu, a scholar in china, brought it into China. From then on, the scholars started to study and inspect the advanced theories. At the same time, they discussed it, supplemented it and tried to make it perfect. The same as metaphor, iconicity is an important content in the cognitive linguistics. And they have something in common. Both of them are based on similarity and they are both the mapping processes. However, there are still some differences. Metaphor can explain the mechanism of iconicity while iconicity can activate the foundation of metaphor, which we call image schema. Metaphor and iconicity are used more and more widely in the modern society. As the development of the world economy, metaphor and iconicity are now widely used in economic discourses. This is also true in economic news. This thesis is concerned with conceptual metaphor from three aspects. They are Oriental Metaphors, Ontological Metaphors, and Structural Metaphors. From the perspective of these three conceptual metaphors, the thesis deals with the usage of metaphors in economic news and it deals with the mechanism of conceptual metaphors from the perspective of iconicity.After the study of the gathered materials, the author analyzes the mapping process of conceptual metaphor in economic news. Besides this, the author introduces and explains the mapping from the source domain to the target domain from the perspective of iconicity. The achievements are:1. There are a large number of metaphors in English economic news. It makes many abstract concepts come into being. Among the metaphors, those commonly seen are Oriental metaphors, Ontological metaphors and Structural metaphors.2. Metaphor and iconicity both have similarity as their basis and both are mapping process. The explanation of the conceptual metaphors in economic news from the perspective of iconicity will help to analyze the formation of abstract concepts and help to understand the complicated economic phenomenon.3. In the mapping process from source domain to target domain or from a concept domain which is familiar to an abstract domain, the image schema is activated. So a complicated economic phenomenon is understood.