| Recent years have seen a strong trend towards multidimension and interdiscipline in the field of cognitive metaphor studies,among which the language of economics has received considerable attention from both economists and linguists.Based on the experiential nature of human cognition,cognitive linguists have so far paid great attention to the universality of conceptual metaphors,yet fail to account for the diversity across cultures.K(?)vecses develops the Cognitive-Cultural Theory(CCT)on the basis of Lakoff and Johanson's standard framework,a theory that proves to be capable of simultaneously accounting for both universality and variation in metaphor.Based on CCT,the thesis conducts a comparative analysis of English and Chinese economics discourse from the Finance and Economics column in The Economists of 2016 issues and Teahouse for Economists of 2016 issues.A mixed design of qualitative and quantitative research is used to study the manifestations,components and main causes of cross-cultural variation in shared conceptual metaphors of both cultures.The study manages to prove the feasibility of CCT applying in real-discourse practice,and can serve to be a valuable contribution to the communication between British and Chinese economists as well as the discipline construction of Business English major.The results show that there are congruent metaphors,alternative metaphors,preferential conceptualization and unique metaphors in English and Chinese metaphor variations;the components of conceptual metaphor involved in these variations consist of source domain,target domain,experiential basis,neural structures,relationship between source and target,metaphorical linguistic expressions and mappings.The thesis also manages to explore and discuss the causes of metaphor variation from the aspect of differential physical environment,differential historical background and differential cultural context. |
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