| Metaphor has always been the research hotspot of linguistics, which already has a long history of more than two thousand years since Aristotle. Nevertheless, traditional linguists have always considered metaphor as a rhetoric and studied it as a kind of linguistic phenomenon. Then in 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By and conceptual metaphor theory was put forward. With the booming development of global economy, more and more people like to read economic news reports and articles in newspaper or on websites. However, people’s comprehension of conceptual metaphor in Chinese and English economic news is influenced by cultures, regions and other reasons. This thesis is going to analyze the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic news, and to explore the causes from the perspective of culture. Therefore, it is expected that this thesis can help readers understand English and Chinese economic news better and promote the cross-cultural communication.Based on the previous linguists’ achievements and supported by conceptual metaphor theory, the method of exemplification is adopted in this thesis to analyze various conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English economic news, and to reveal conceptual metaphor’s universality in economic discourse. The concrete economic news discourses are the main corpus of the thesis. Therefore, some representative news reports are chosen as research data. As for English news, China Daily, 21 st Century, The Economist and English websites BBC and VOA are chosen as the English corpus of this thesis. And Economic Daily, Securities Daily, and Chinese website China Economic Net are used as Chinese linguistic data in research. The author chooses the latest and the most representative sentences that contain conceptual metaphor to study. There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter One is literature review which mainly introduces the definitions, classifications, features and functions of metaphor and conceptual metaphor and previous studies of conceptual metaphor in economic news at home and abroad. Chapter Two and Chapter Three are the main parts of this study in which Chapter Two analyzes the cultural similarities of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic news, and Chapter Three discusses the cultural differences of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic news. And Chapter Four mainly explores the causes of the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphor in English and Chinese economic news from the aspects of cultures, geography, pragmatics etc.On the basis of the above analysis of the collected materials, conclusions can be made as follows:(1) Conceptual metaphors are pervasive in economic news.(2) Conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English economic news have similarities and differences.(3) The causes include culture, geography, and religion etc.Because the corpus is the miscellaneous and this thesis involves interdisciplinary knowledge of economics and stock market, there are some limitations in this thesis. The study of conceptual metaphor in economic news is relatively a new issue, therefore, more deep discussions and researches need to be done, such as how to study conceptual metaphor in economic news from other perspectives, how to describe the other features and functions of them etc. |
PDF Full Text Request