A Cognitive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors On Chinese Economy In The Economist

The study on metaphor has a history of more than thousands of years. It hastraditionally been perceived as a pure linguistic phenomenon. The traditional views onmetaphor were fully revolutionized after Lakoff and his colleagues proposing a newtheory of metaphor from a cognitive standpoint. The novel theory has highlighted thecognitive and communicative features of language. It states that cognitive metaphor isa conceptual model or a way of thinking. Metaphorical studies from a cognitiveperspective start coming out after the recognition of the theory.With the rapid development of economy, business discourse has aroused theinterest of many cognitive linguistics scholars. They studied the conceptual metaphorsin business discourse from various perspectives and achieved fruitful results. Thethesis is a cognitive study of the metaphors appeared in the economic reviews onChina in the Economist of the year2012based on the Lakoff’s theory framework andwith reference to the results of previous studies. Both the qualitative and quantitativeanalytical methods are used to figure out the typical conceptual metaphors in theseeconomic review articles and the potential attitude and ideology they convey.The results show a wide use of conceptual metaphors in such economic reviewarticles, which further confirmed the ubiquity feature of metaphor proposed by Lakoff.It also indicates the Economist intend to use conceptual metaphors to describe theabstract economic phenomena in China. In addition, six major conceptual metaphorshave been drawn from the corpus, which include the metaphor of UP and DOWN, theHUMAN metaphor, the WAR metaphor, LIQUID metaphor, BUILDING metaphorand ANIMAL metaphor. The study has found that these six metaphors are significantlydifferent in number, which implies different cognitive effect. For example, themetaphor of human growth takes up a great proportion. It means to express a positiveassessment of China’s economy in general. Meanwhile, implicit attitude and ideologycan be found from the use of all these conceptual metaphors, thus getting an overallimpression of the cognitive meanings of the conceptual metaphors.