A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Metaphors In English And Chinese Financial Reports On Economic Crisis

This paper aims to show that metaphors are a powerful tool to frame economic issues. To this purpose, the author has carried out a comparative study of the conceptual metaphors of the Global Systemic Crisis in both English and Chinese. The financial crisis has indeed caused havoc in the economic panorama worldwide. China has been no exception, but, unlike other countries, financial problems were initially belittled by the Chinese mass media for several months, until the subsequent outbreak of the crisis in relatively recent times. Following the current trend of corpus approaches to metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black,2004; Deignan,2006; Stefanowitsch and Gries,2006), this study is based on two copra of English and Chinese financial articles selected from those published during2007and the end of2008in the English journal The Economist and the Chinese newspaper《中国经济周刊》Each corpus consisted of two different subcorpora which revolve around two different stages of the development of the Subprime Crisis. The analysis and comparison of the metaphors used in these two groups of corpora will allow us to show how the same economic reality may be differently conceptualized at different points of time, on account of different socio-political factor.At last the author's predictions were confirmed in the sense that the English articles would have a higher number of metaphors used in a negative sense than Chinese articles from some time previous to September2008. This study has also revealed some of the advantages of the MPA method and proved that it is particularly useful for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison.This paper is organized into five chapters. Chapter1briefly introduces the researching background, the aim and significance of the study and then outlines the whole organization of this paper. Chapter2presents a theoretical foundation, reviewing the relevant literature which serves as a theoretical basis, and introduces some previous studies on this field. Chapter3introduces the corpus used, elaborates on the detailed methodology and procedure of the study. Chapter4describes the results of the analysis with the help of a lot of tables and graphs. Chapter5is the conclusion part which briefly overviews the findings, implications and limitations of the study, and some suggestions are offered for the further research in this field...