A Comparative Study Of Metaphors In Chinese And American Economic News Reports

As a pervasive phenomenon, metaphor has been a heated topic under discussion since Aristotle. Until now, scholars have established several theories on metaphor. Traditional theories regard metaphor as a figure of speech. However, since George Lakoff & Mark Johnson raised conceptual metaphor theory in Metaphors We Live By in 1980, cognitive researches into metaphor arouse scholars'wide interests. Many scholars have made search on conceptual metaphors in many different fields, among which economic discourse catches great attention. Economic news reports, which are closely-related with daily life, usually apply vivid and rich metaphorical expressions to describe abstract economic concepts. Metaphors are pervasive in economic news reports and play an important role. The thesis aims to analyze the similarities and differences on conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American economic news reports.After having a literature review, the author makes a qualitative analysis of the 201 collected metaphorical expressions from 100 news reports in Chinese and English, which are taken from two-month (October 1,2010 to December 1,2010) economic news of New York Times and Economic Daily(《经济日报》) respectively. New York Times was taken from online material of NewsBank, and Economic Daily was taken from its website directly.The empirical data are divided into eight typical conceptual metaphors in terms of their source domains. They are HUMAN BEING, WAR, JOURNEY, UP/DOWN, WATER, CLIMATE, NON-HUMAN OBJECTS, CONTAINER. By analyzing four major ones (HUMAN BEING, WAR, JOURNEY, and UP/DOWN) on the basis of Idealized Conceptual Models theory, the following results can be concluded:(1) There is a high degree of similarity between Chinese and American economic news reports in conceptual metaphors, which reflect that conceptual metaphors are not arbitrary, but primarily rooted in common human bodily experience. It demonstrates the homogeneity of conceptual metaphors under different cultural models.(2) Cultural diversity manifests itself in both conceptual metaphors and their metaphorical expressions. It demonstrates the heterogeneity of conceptual metaphors under different cultural models.In brief, people understand and construct abstract economic concepts through human bodily experience, and such conceptual metaphor somewhat have cultural differences.