| Metaphor is originally defined as a rhetorical device at the linguistic level.It is irrelevant to human cognitive activities.The earliest study of metaphor can be traced back to the Aristotle times.The Metaphors We Live By coauthored by Lakoff and Johnson opens a new chapter for the study of conceptual metaphor.Researches about this theory are generally divided into two categories: the traditional metaphorical study with the focus on rhetoric function and the comprehensive metaphorical research on cognitive function.They point out that conceptual metaphor serves as a sort of thinking mode and cognitive method widely existing in all spheres of human life.Metaphor is the cross-domain mapping from the source domain to the target domain.The nature of metaphor is to help people comprehend or experience one thing in terms of the other.Metaphor extensively penetrates into our daily language,thought and action.Its widespread application in text corpora is helpful to transmit information accurately and manifest the textual content vividly.The rapid development of global urbanization and the acceleration of real estate industry result in the explosion of property news information.In order to facilitate readers to grasp property dynamics and make an accurate purchasing or selling decision,text writers usually quote a large number of conceptual metaphors to illustrate the abstract economic phenomena.This thesis selects property news from China Financial Times and The Economist which was reported from 2014 to 2016.A total of 40 Chinese and 40 English texts are selected randomly.Conceptual metaphors contained in these texts are picked and classified according to its source domain.Through the comparison and analysis ofconceptual metaphors in the two languages,the author tries to explore the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors in two cultural backgrounds as well as the discrepancy of cognitive mechanism between the East and the West.This study found that conceptual metaphors widely exists in Chinese and English property news reports.There are seven distinct conceptual metaphors commonly existing Chinese and English property discourses,including temperature metaphor,war metaphor,up-down metaphor,building metaphor,machine metaphor,liquid metaphor and human being metaphor.Though possessing different living patterns,people in China and the West have similar cognitive mechanism.Those metaphors work together to illustrate the fluctuation of property market,price change and the cognitive psychology of property participants. |
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