A Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Economic News Headlines

Metaphor has always been a research focus for linguistic studies. Up to now, researchers have establishedvarious theories about metaphor. Among those theories, conceptual metaphor theory brought forward by Lakoffand Johnson has offered us a new perspective to understand the world around us. As the summary of the newsreport, headlines play a significant role in acquainting reader with the main point of the news. With the use ofconceptual metaphor, readers could better grasp the gist of an economic news report. This study aims to make acomparative study of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese economic news headlines to find out thesimilarities and differences between them and try to explain the similarities and differences from the perspectiveof culture.In this thesis, economic news headlines are collected first. Following Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptualmetaphor theory, a comparative study of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic news headlineswill be made. The qualitative method will be employed to analyze the categorized conceptual metaphors in theselected204economic news headlines. Eight types of conceptual metaphors are classified according to differentsource domains, namely journey metaphor, game metaphor, war metaphor, weather metaphor, human beingmetaphor, building metaphor, liquid metaphor, and idiom metaphor. After comparing similarities and differencesbetween them, we could draw the conclusions of factors lead to similarities and differences from the perspectiveof culture. The findings reveal that the metaphorical concepts in two languages are basically the same due to thecommon cognitive basis they shared. However, the usage of some of the metaphorical concepts varies fromChinese to English news headlines due to the differences of broader cultural context, natural physicalenvironment. This thesis could be helpful in the research of metaphor, and also these results would help peoplebetter understand western culture, and further enhance their cognitive ability to learn a foreign language.