A Corpus-based Study Of Metaphors In The Economic Discourses

This thesis compares metaphors used in three different types of economic discourses: academic journals,economics textbooks and financial magazines.The research orientation can be decomposed into three research questions:(1)What might be the similarities in the choice of different source domains and their linguistic expressions in economics textbooks,academic journals and financial magazines respectively?(2)What might be the differences in the choice of source domains and their linguistic expressions in the three types of economic discourses?(3)What are the underlying factors leading to the observed similarities and differences?To answer the above research questions,corpus-based quantitative method is employed.This thesis compares three self-built corpora,namely Corpus of Economics Academic Journals(CEAJ),Corpus of Economics Textbooks(CETB)and Corpus of Economic Financial Magazines(CEFM).CEAJ consists of eighty articles from The Quarterly Journal of Economics,which is a top-ranked academic journal of economics.CETB is composed of three widely-accepted introductory economics textbooks.And CEFM gathered 279 articles from three columns of Bloomberg Businessweek: Global Economics,Company/Industry and Market/Finance.A source domain checklist is compiled to extract linguist metaphors from the three corpora using Word Smith Tools.The results show that:(1)Economics textbooks,economic academic journals and financial magazines share some common features in the choice of metaphor:firstly,linguistic metaphors of the five source domains exist in all the three corpora regardless of the differences in numbers of types and tokens;secondly,the most frequently used conceptual metaphors such as ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AREDISEASES,THE ECONOMY IS AN ANIMAL,MARKET IS A MECHANISM,rise to prominence in the three types of texts and materialize in the form of conventionalized linguistic metaphors;(2)Financial magazines used more metaphors than economics textbooks and academic journals in source domains of the human body,health and illness,animal and plant;While economics textbooks and academic journals used more mechanical metaphors than financial magazines;(3)Shared language background and especially shared background of economics lead to the occurrences of shared conventionalized linguistic metaphors and common conceptual metaphors;different readerships and writing purposes influence authors' choices of metaphors to achieve different functions in economics textbooks,academic journals and financial magazines.