A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Market Metaphor In English And Chinese

The cognitive turn of metaphor has inspired increasing interest in research of this field.Although scholars have made innumerable achievements on cognitive metaphor research,they did not keep a watchful eye on the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparative study of metaphor.Language encodes and externalizes our thoughts through the lens of embodiment.Metaphor,as a feature of language,also has an experiential basis.These arguments in cognitive linguistics explained the universal aspect of metaphor but did not answer why some conceptual metaphors vary cross-culturally.The present study will compare MARKET metaphor from conceptual and linguistic perspective and contribute to the understanding of the cultural basis of metaphor and hopefully to provide new insights into a more comprehensive cognitive-cultural theory of metaphor in general.The general topic of this study can be decomposed into four research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the employment frequency of MARKET metaphor in English and Chinese?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the choice of source domains of MARKET metaphor in both languages?(3)What are the similarities and differences in the linguistic metaphorical expressions of the same conceptual metaphors in both languages?(4)What causes these universalities and variations in both languages?With our intentions to make a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison of MARKET metaphors,a corpus-based approach will be adopted in order to draw some conclusions from natural linguistic facts on a big scale.The English data come from the Business and Finance & Economy column in the famous English weekly magazine the Economist.The Chinese data is composed of the articles of Chanye & Gongsi and Jinrong & Ziben columns in China Economy Weekly,a weekly magazine in Chinese.These news articles are similar in content and topics among which Business and Chanye & Gongsi make description of the micro-economic phenomenon while Finance & Economy and Jinrong & Ziben describes the macro-economy.Wordsmith Tools 5.0 is used to generate all the concordance lines with the search word market in English and shichang in Chinese.The results show that:(1)Metaphors with market/shichang as the target domain word represent 61 percent and 67 percent in English and Chinese respectively;(2)MARKET metaphor has the identical 17 categories of source domains in both languages;(3)There are significant differences as to the source expressions and frequency of specific source domains.For example,jinggengxizuo accounts for high frequency in Chinese MARKET IS A LAND but has no low frequency in English;(4)The similar structures and functions of human body,the shared cognitive model of the Great Chain of Being,the common experience of the global market and the cultural integration give rise to the universal metaphors in English and Chinese.The variation is caused by differential experiences and differential cognitive preferences or styles of people in English and Chinese culture.