A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And American Economics News Headlines

Metaphor is pervasive in life. Metaphorical thinking is a common phenomenon in language, thought and action. Metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a rhetorical device. And yet it is viewed as a cognitive activity in which experiences in well-known domain are mapped onto those in less well-known domain. As a medium of mass communication, news report has attracted increasing attention of more and more scholars. Among the metaphorical studies of news reports, there is no systematic comparative study of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American economic news headlines. Therefore this thesis makes a preliminary attempt to apply the cognitive linguistic theories to reveal the relationship between language and thought. The research also attempts to study the similar and different manifestation of metaphors in Chinese and American news headlines.In this thesis, the economic news headlines in the Economist and the Economic Outlook respectively during60months (totally including12886economic headlines) are chosen as the data. Adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods, the thesis conducts a cognitive study on the conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American economic news headlines in two aspects:on the one hand, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory is applied to examine the mapping process of conceptual metaphors appeared in the economic news headlines; on the other hand, Lakoff s Idealized Cognitive Model(1987) is employed to analyze the cognitive models in different cultures. Through comparative analysis, it can be found that there are13typical conceptual metaphors——WAR, JPURNEY, PERSON, CONTAINER, SPORT, MEDICAL TREATMENT, NATURE, UP/DOWN SPACE, ANIMAL, OBJECT, DREAM metaphor. In the economic news headlines, among which WAR metaphor is the most frequent one in occurrences; metaphor has the features of variety, systematicity and cultural coherence due to the common physical experience and perception of the world, however, there are still subtle differences between them because of the differences in cultural background.In summary, applying the cognitive linguistic theories to the economic news headlines can achieve a better mastering of the language and the understanding of different cultures, thus grasping the application value of the metaphor study.