| The use of and study on metaphor have been a long history. Many scholars havestudied the metaphor phenomenon from different perspectives and put forward numeroustheories on metaphor since Aristotle, which is a great contribution to the comprehensionof metaphor. Traditional views regard metaphor only as a figure of speech, so the studyon metaphor only focuses on the literature field and there has been little research on otherfields. With the rising of cognitive linguistics from1980s, the traditional metaphor theoryhas been challenged. In1980, Lakoff and Johnson put forward the Conceptual Metaphortheory in their book “Metaphors We Live By”, marking the comprehensive beginning ofcognitive metaphor studies. Metaphor study has turned to the cognitive aspect from thetraditional rhetorical and semantic aspects of research, bringing a prelude to modernmetaphor research. From the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor theory, metaphor is notonly a language phenomenon, but a mode of thought and cognition.Economy plays an important role in the development of society. With the rapiddevelopment of economic globalization, the economic ties between countries have beenincreasingly close. As a means of information dissemination, news plays an irreplaceablerole in people’s getting and understanding economic information. However, manyeconomic phenomena and economic terms are abstract and hard to understand. In orderto improve readers’ interest, and improve their understanding of economic news,economic news writers use a lot of metaphors, which has drawn the attention of linguists.Studying metaphor phenomenon in economic news under the guidance of rhetoric canonly involve its surface problems. Only a cognitive approach can analyze the mechanismand function of it.Taking Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor theory as the theoretical foundation, thisthesis studies the metaphor phenomenon in English economic news, trying to answerthree questions:1. What are the typical conceptual metaphors in English economic news?2. What is the mapping process from source domain to target domain?3. What are thefunctions of these conceptual metaphors in English economic news? The data of thisthesis are collected from authoritative newspapers such as “The Economist”,“Business Week”, etc.This thesis consists of three parts: the introduction, the body and the conclusion.The introduction part mainly introduces the research status of metaphor at home andabroad, the research significance and value in theory and reality.The body is composed of three chapters:The first chapter is the literature review part, mainly reviewing the "comparisontheory", the "substitution theory" and the "interaction theory", which are representative ofthe traditional theories of metaphor, and the conceptual metaphor theory, which isrepresentative of the cognitive metaphor theories.Based on Lakoff’s classification of conceptual metaphor, the second chapteridentifies eight types of conceptual metaphor systems commonly used in Englisheconomic news. Then an analysis of their working mechanism from source domain totarget domain is given from the cognitive perspective.The third chapter is to analyze the functions of conceptual metaphor in Englisheconomic news and functions such as the textual function, the social-cultural functionand the constructing function, etc. are found.The conclusion part summarizes the research contents of this thesis and the researchresults. There are eight categories of conceptual metaphor most frequently used inEnglish economic news, which plays an important function in English economic newswriting and understanding. This part also describes the theoretical and the practicalsignificance of this thesis, and points out the deficiency of the research and therecommendations for future research. |
PDF Full Text Request