Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Business Discourse

Lakoff and Johnson put forward the conceptual metaphor theory in their bookMetaphors We Live By, which perceives metaphor as a cognitive process rather thanrhetorical flourish. Conceptual metaphors keep coherence with culture, manifestingthe intangible cognitive patterns. Based on the integrated relationship between cultureand metaphor, this thesis is aimed at researching metaphors in business discoursefrom an intercultural perspective, and expects to find out cultural variables whichinfluence the metaphorical variations most in English and Chinese.The English and Chinese metaphor corpuses are established with the mainstreammagazines Economist (English magazine) and Business (Chinese magazine) as datasource. Based on these two small-scale corpuses,170Chinese sample metaphors and170English ones are extracted randomly. According to their source domains, the mostcommonly used categories of metaphor are sorted out. They are UP-DOWN Metaphor,WAR Metaphor, JOURNEY Metaphor, FAMILY Metaphor, COUNTRY Metaphorand SPORTS Metaphor in Chinese, while UP-DOWN Metaphor, WAR Metaphor,JOURNEY Metaphor, SAILING Metaphor, SPORTS Metaphor and RELIGIONMetaphor in English.The research method of this thesis is qualitative analysis, with the combination ofdata description and explanation. After comparison, metaphorical variations inEnglish and Chinese cultural models are found out and discussed from an interculturalperspective in the following four aspects: family value, political system, marineculture and religion.The primary purpose of this paper is to contribute to intercultural communicationin business area by the study of conceptual metaphors. Aiming at this primary purpose,the research has reached three main conclusions: first, conceptual metaphors canbecome a clue to trace cultural models; second, UP-DOWN, WAR, JOURNEY,FAMILY, COUNTRY and SPORTS are the high-frequently used source domains inChinese business discourse, while UP-DOWN, WAR, JOURNEY, SAILING,SPORTS and RELIGION are the ones in English.; third, family value, political system,marine culture and religion are the four cultural variables leading to the metaphoricalvariations in English and Chinese business discourse.