The Analysis Of Metaphor In Chinese And American Financial Reporting Within The Framework Of Critical Metaphor Analysis

Metaphor is always the hot issue for study. The theories about metaphor areproposed, such as the Comparison Theory by Aristotle, the Interaction Theory byRichard and Black. Traditionally, metaphor is taken as a figure of speech. With thedevelopment and deepening of metaphor study, more and more studies figure out thatthe nature of metaphor is to understand the abstract domain via concrete domain. It isnot only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon. It is also the toolfor people to know and understand the world.Due to the abstractness and complexity of finance, there exist abundant metaphorsin financial reporting. There have been a great number of studies on metaphor ineconomic discourses at home and abroad. However, most studies focus on singlelanguage. Among the scare contrast studies, most of them contrast English withlanguages of European countries. The contrast study on metaphors in Chinese andEnglish financial reporting is lack.Critical Metaphor Analysis, an effective approach to explore the hidden ideologythat determines the choice of metaphors, incorporates linguistic, pragmatic andcognitive features of metaphor. Based on the corpus, this thesis attempts to studymetaphors in Chinese and English financial reporting via critical metaphor analysis.This paper compares the use of linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor in a corpusof Chinese and English financial reports published in newspapers and magazines. Themetaphorical expressions are categorized into three conceptual keys: the financialactivity is an organism, the financial movements are physical movements and theterrible financial activity is disaster. Findings indicate much similarities and differencesbetween Chinese and English financial reporting on RMB. In Chinese corpus, organismmetaphors take the first place, disaster metaphors second, movement metaphors third.While in English corpus, organism metaphors take the first place, movement metaphorssecond, disaster metaphors third. This thesis finds out another conceptual metaphorexisting in Chinese and English corpus, the game and gambling metaphor. Thisconceptual metaphor appears more frequently in English corpus. It also demonstratesthe subtle distinctions in the detailed application of metaphorical concept due to thegeneral cognitive and cultural differences. It is people’s perception of the world thatmakes both languages share a great number of the same or similar metaphors. As for the differences of metaphor between the two corpora, this thesis believes that theunderstanding of the environment and value system influence the metaphor choice..