A Contrastive Study Of Metaphors In English And Chinese Economic Discourses

In the traditional theory, metaphor is treated only as a figure of speech and as thedeviation of literal language. Nonetheless, the year 1980 witnessed a cognitive turn inmetaphor studies with the landmark publication of Lakoff and Johnson's masterpiece,Metaphors We Live By. In the contemporary theory, metaphor is considered as amatter of thought, a way of cognition. And metaphor is pervasive in our daily livesand languages. It is embodied in nature and plays a fundamental role in organizing ourconceptual systems.Cognitive linguistics has broadened the vision for metaphor studies. Thepreceding research has made great success in the contrastive studies on some certaintypes of conceptual metaphors. However, the systematical research of conceptualmetaphor is far from enough in a certain style, especially in the dynamic and timelydiscourses. The undergoing research in this field is largely done in English discourses,which lacks universal foundation. In view of this situation, this thesis selects theeconomic discourses with dynamic and timely features as well as objective economiclaws as the object of research. Both descriptive and quantitative approaches areemployed to analyze a number of metaphorical samples drawn from over 20economic discourses both in English and Chinese. The thesis attempts to findcross-culture evidence in the dynamic discourse for supporting Lakoff's statements onmetaphor by carrying on the contrastive study.Since the era of Aristotle from two thousand years ago, the interpretation ofmetaphor has undergone a change from a figure of speech to a mode of thinking. Thethesis mainly adopts the views of the contemporary metaphor theory represented byLakoff. It introduces the cognitive essence and the philosophical basis as well as theclassification and the major characteristics of metaphor. The purpose is to provide asolid theoretical basis and a feasible theoretical framework for the process ofrecognizing, comprehending and interpreting metaphors in the contrastive study.The data of the study comes from twenty-four economic texts of fourauthoritative magazines and newspapers published in the West and in China. In theprocess of the data collection, firstly, two approaches are applied to the identificationof metaphors in the study. On the one hand, the "family similarity" of the figures ofspeech is employed to recognize some novel and clearly formed metaphoricalexpressions;on the other hand, some conventional metaphors and idiomaticexpressions are identified by following the principle of the cross-domain mapping inthe cognitive theory of metaphor. Then all the selected metaphorical samples arereclassified in accordance with the source domains they belong to and the conceptualmetaphors underlying these metaphorical expressions are formulated.Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted in the process of thedata analysis. Firstly, the samples are specifically classified and described;the next isthe statistic analysis of the data, counting the total numbers and frequencies ofoccurrence of metaphors in both Chinese and English;lastly, the results of analysisand research are discussed and summarized.The findings of the study reveal that owing to the common bodily experiencesshared by human beings, the metaphors in the two languages are of considerablesimilarities. Numerous different metaphorical expressions can formulate the samemetaphorical concepts. And the frequencies and numbers of some conceptualmetaphors occurred in the two languages are approximately same. However, due tothe differences in historical sources, cultural backgrounds and ideological concepts,the metaphorical expressions in the two languages bear their distinctive characteristicsrespectively. And the frequencies and numbers of some certain types of conceptualmetaphors differ greatly. The results of the study also indicate that metaphoricalexpressions can convey the abstract economic concepts and laws. And the culturalvarieties of metaphors should not only involve the different linguistic forms anddifferent metaphorical concepts. The difference in terms of the frequencies of thesame metaphorical concept may also reveal the varieties among cultures.