A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Metaphors In Economic Discourse

The present paper is a corpus-based comparative study of Chinese and English metaphors in the reports of financial crisis discourse. The objectives of this paper are three-fold: first, it aims to examine the relationship between concepts and ideology as exemplified in the economic discourse. Second, it attempts to approach a corpus-based method for critical metaphor analysis in the contrastive study and to interpret findings from a multi-layer perspective including cognitive, linguistic and pragmatic dimensions. Third, it aims to raise the awareness of the role of culture, ideology and history in the choice and interpretation of metaphors.The present study is based o two self-built corpora—Chinese News Texts (CNT) and English News Texts (ENT). Both consist of news reports on the financial crises. The CNT has 314800 tokens while the ENT has 186000 tokens. Texts are taken from two time period of the 2008 and 2011 financial crisis, respectively from the period of April 1 to December 30, 2008 and April 1 to June 30, 2011. Texts in CNT are sampled from Xinhua.net and Economy Observation while texts in ENT are sampled from Washington post and New York Times. All the texts are from mainstream resources.With the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative methods, wordlists of CNT and BNT are compared against each other. Linguistic expressions are carefully examined and categorized. Drawing on Sinclair's Model of Extended Unit of Meaning, metaphors'collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody are described through an examination of their collocates and concordance in the two corpora.It is found that systematic difference exists between Chinese media and the English media in the choice of metaphor and the understanding towards the crises. First, the culture and history influence the choice of metaphors. Chinese discourse has metaphors originating from the two-river-culture, namely the culture of Yangzi River and the Yellow River, and Chinese idioms, while English discourse does not. Second, the difference in stances, attitudes and ideology is shown in the two discourses. Towards the priority of concerns, Chinese discourse is concerned with the spreading of crisis and its impact on China while English discourse tends to ignore the impact of the crisis towards other countries. Attitudes towards the causes of the crisis and the recovering of the economy also differ. Chinese discourse blames the western countries for causing the crisis and portrays developing countries as vulnerable victims while English discourse does not concern much of the causes. Both remain unoptimistic towards the recovery of the economy. The difference of ideology get reflected in the role of government. In the Chinese discourse, government plays an important role in taking the responsibility to stabilize the society and economy. While in the English discourse, the rule of the market or economy is regarded to play the role of regulating.Linguistically, corpus linguistics is proved to be extremely useful in critical metaphor analysis. It is hoped that this paper can contribute to the improvement of methodology in contrastive analysis of metaphors.