An Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphor On The Reports Of The U.S.Fiscal Cliff In The Economist

Metaphor has always been a hot topic for western philosophers and linguists. About2000years ago, Aristotle believed that metaphor was a kind of ornamental language and a gift of genius; in the1930s, Richards proposed the interaction theory of metaphor which had challenged those previous views; during the1970s, great passion has been given to the study of metaphor in different views by scholars from different fields, such as cognitive linguistics, philosophy, psychology, pragmatics, as well as semiotics multi-dimensionally, which was described as the phenomena of Metaphormania; in the year1980, the book Metaphors We Live By, published by Lakoff and Johnson(1980), has established the position of metaphor in cognition revolutionarily and opened up a new era of metaphor. The view held in this book is that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life not just in language but in thought and action; the conceptual system that we live by is largely metaphorical, not only in the way we think, but also what we experience, as well as what we do every day.With the rapid development of economy, more and more economic phenomena appear; thus more and more new abstract economic concepts are coming along, for instance, the term of "fiscal cliff’. Fiscal cliff refers to the simultaneous expiry of tax breaks and the introduction of tax increases and spending cuts that were due at the end of2012, the cumulation of which was expected to push the US back in recession. This situation made the US government spending curve as a cliff, which is the origin of the "fiscal cliff’ phenomenon. Lots of reports and comments on fiscal cliff are in newspapers and magazines, then how do these reports and comments unfold with the metaphor of "cliff’, or are there any other kinds of metaphors used to describe this phenomenon? Based on the theoretical foundation, the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980), and the data collected from the reports on the current affairs U.S. Fiscal Cliff in the authoritative magazine The Economist as the research objects, this thesis attempts to help people have a better understanding of various kinds of complex and abstract economic concepts by means of investigation into the working mechanism of conceptual metaphor in economic discourse under the theory of conceptual metaphor.The study shows that there are numerous metaphors in the reports of fiscal cliff in The Economist. The metaphor "CLIFF" shows that America’s financial is in a danger zone and people have different comments on its origin, its development, as well as its future with metaphorical language. In the reports and comments, different kinds of metaphors related to the "CLIFF" are also employed, among which the war metaphor is used in a higher frequency relatively, which makes the reports vivid and easy to understand. It is hoped that the analysis in this thesis may help readers of The Economist have a better understanding of the comments on the issues of "fiscal cliff", hence to facilitate the construction of metaphorical thinking of other economic concepts and phenomena.