| In the traditional theory, metaphor is treated only as a figure of speech and as the deviation of literal language. Nonetheless, the year 1980 witnessed a cognitive turn in metaphor studies with the landmark publication of George Lakoff and Johnson's masterpiece, Metaphors We Live By in which the contemporary theory was born. In the contemporary theory, metaphor is considered as a matter of thought, a way of cognition. And metaphor is pervasive in our daily lives and languages. It is embodied in nature and plays a fundamental role in organizing human being's conceptual system.With the development of the economy, a large amount of metaphors are flooding in business discourses and they arouse many scholars'interests. However, many of their researches only focus on the perspective of figure of speech or language on metaphors. And these researches couldn't reveal the working mechanism of metaphor. Enlightened by the previous studies on metaphor, this thesis conducts a cognitive study on the conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese business news which is attracting more and more attention.This thesis aims to uncover the conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese business news by exploring the following questions:(1) What are the typical conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese business news?(2) What are the typical characteristics of these conceptual metaphors in the business news?(3) How do these metaphors realize their mapping processes from the source domain to the target domain?To answer the questions above, this thesis investigates the relevant conceptual metaphors through a general study and three case studies. Qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted in the process of the data analysis. Firstly, the samples are specifically classified and described; the next is the statistic analysis of the data, counting the total numbers and frequencies of occurrences of metaphors in business news both in English and Chinese languages。Secondly,as the texts involves two different languages, the contrastive analysis is also carried out. Lastly, the results of analysis and research are discussed and summarized.The results of the overall study show that in business news, there are eight typical conceptual metaphors. Among them, ECONOMY AS PERSON is the most frequent one in occurrences, followed by ECONOMY AS WAR, ECONOMY AS JOURNEY, ECONOMY AS UP/DOWN SPACE, ECONOMY AS MACHINE, ECONOMY AS BUILDING, ECONOMY AS PLANT/ANIMAL and ECONOMY AS CONTAINER, etc.The three case studies reveal that the mapping processes of conceptual metaphors consist of four steps: the entity of the source domain mapped onto the target domain; then the relationship and feature of the source domain mapped onto the target domain; and then the inference patterns of the source domain mapped onto the target domain.The whole study reveals that English and Chinese languages show a high degree of similarity in the basic metaphorical mapping under the eight categories of metaphor, which reflect that conceptual metaphors are not arbitrary, but are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience. However, due to the differences in cultural backgrounds, the metaphorical expressions in the two languages bear their distinctive characteristics respectively.The findings in the study can be applied to the teaching of economics or business writing. |
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