A Contrastive Study Of Event Structure Metaphor Between Chinese And English Economic Reports

Metaphor has long been a territory of human inquiry ever since Aristotle’s era.The study of metaphor undergoes a shift from a rhetorical device to a mode ofthinking of human beings. The cognitive metaphorical study holds that metaphor isthe systemic mapping from the source domain to the target domain. Event StructureMetaphor is nominated as a candidate for metaphor study by Lakoff. Linguists studyEvent Structure Metaphor on the basis of image schema and cognitive semanticstheories. However, less attention has been paid to the crosslinguistic research of EventStructure Metaphor in the field of economy. In view of this, the thesis adopts acontrastive approach to Event Structure Metaphor in Chinese and English economicreports, aiming to answer the following research questions:1. How is Event Structure Metaphor reflected in Chinese and English economicreports?2. What are the similar and different features of Event Structure Metaphorbetween Chinese and English economic reports?The sources of data are sixty-four economic reports selected from The Economistand中国经营报with thirty-two from each of the above two newspapers. The timespan is from January1stto December30thin2013. Among these reports, eighteenreports are on stocks, twelve on macroeconomics, twenty-two on currency and twelveon banking. The number of the Chinese reports is equal to that of the English reportson the above topics. By means of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the thesisattempts to explore how Event Structure Metaphor is reflected and reveal the similarand different features of Event Structure Metaphor in Chinese and English economicreports.The major findings are as follows:(1) Various aspects of event structure, namelystates, changes, processes, actions, causes, purposes and means are metaphoricallyconstructed and comprehended via physical concepts of space, motion and force bothin Chinese and English economic reports. Specifically, metaphors in the locationversion namely “states are locations”,“changes are movements”,“forces are causes”,“actions are self-propelled movements”,“purposes are destinations”,“means arepaths”,“difficulties are impediments to motion”,“expected progress is a travelschedule” and “long-term purposeful activities are journeys” are reflected. Meanwhile,those metaphors in the object version such as “attributes are objects”,“changes are movements”,“causes are forces”,“actions are self-propelled acquisitions or losses”and “achieving a purpose is acquiring a desired object” are reflected in Chinese andEnglish economic reports. This research confirms the universality of metaphor.(2)The similar feature of Event Structure Metaphor in Chinese and English economicreports lies at the conceptual level. Both the Chinese and their English counterpartscognitively reason about economic events in terms of the concepts of motion, spaceand force. The different feature of Event Structure Metaphor lies at the specificlinguistic level, manifested in such aspects as states, movements and difficulties.Compared with English economic reports, Chinese economic reports have morefront-back horizontal space-relation words for ordinal location in the rank. Besides,they contain more linguistic instantiations for movements on the land to conceptualizechanges as well. In addition, the lexical indicator as “关” and its related phrases whichare employed to express difficulties in Chinese economic can nowhere be found inEnglish economic reports. The different feature at the level of language displays thatmetaphor coheres with culture.