A Research On The Metaphoric Production Competence Of Business English Learners

According to Contemporary Metaphor Theory,metaphor is not merely a rhetorical device of a language phenomenon but also a cognitive instrument for human beings to conceptualize their surrounding world.Specifically speaking,metaphor is a process mapping from the source domain to the target domain.People tend to map the familiar semantic elements of the source domain to the unfamiliar concepts of the target domain to construct their cognition.Due to their ubiquitous existence in business English,business metaphors are utilized to build the cognitive conceptualization of unfamiliar business affairs by foreign language learners.However,the fact that business metaphors evolve with the dynamic business world makes it harder for business English learners to acquire sufficient metaphoric competence.Since the important role that metaphor plays in foreign language teaching has been well recognized in recent years,more and more metaphor-related course designs and activity arrangements are introduced to foreign language learning classroom,yet the attention drawn to business English and current metaphoric competence of business English learners is still far from enough.This thesis aims to discover the metaphoric competence of business English learners from the perspective of metaphoric production.The author will explain the overall situation of metaphoric production,the underlying cognitive models that guide metaphoric production,the influential factors that affect the metaphor choice of business English learners and then offer suggestions for metaphor learning and teaching accordingly.The overall situation of metaphoric production is analyzed from three aspects: metaphoric density,metaphoric frequency and metaphoric misapplication,by which the author will explore various source domains applied,characteristics of the distribution of source domains,and reasonable explanations that lead to the characteristics.Business reports written by students majored in Business English are collected from a business practice contest for data analysis.Data are analyzed with a bottom-upprocess to categorize source domains from identified linguistic metaphors.The author uses Pragglejaz Metaphor Identification Procedure(MIP)as a tool to identify linguistic metaphors and classifies various source domains with reference to Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT).In addition,factors that influence the metaphor choice of business English learners are elaborately explored with reference to Charteris-Black's theory of Critical Metaphor Analysis(CMA).The findings of this thesis are as follows.Firstly,metaphoric density and frequency of the written business reports are not high,the situation of metaphoric misapplication appears as well.Most produced metaphoric expressions of the target language coincide with the conceptual system of the mother language and situations of metaphoric misapplication are mainly caused by interference of the negative conceptual transference of the mother language.Source domains are more diversified than expected.Secondly,individual and social resources are two main resources that influence the metaphor choice of business English learners.On basis of this study,the author suggests that teachers pay more attention to illustrate the underlying mapping mechanism of metaphors,analyze influential factors of metaphor choice and make a contrastive analysis of conceptual systems of both languages.In addition,the introduction of social ideology,history and culture of the target language is crucial during the process of foreign language teaching since the unique cyclopedia knowledge and information of the target language community is the foundation for metaphoric inference and production.