A Cognitive Study Of Chinese And American Financial Report Headlines From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

In the 1980 s, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson marks the metaphor study getting rid of traditional shackles and entering into the field of cognitive study. The CMT holds that metaphor is pervasive in human language and it is a reflection of human thinking patterns and human behaviors. Since then, a large quantity of scholars have demonstrated and supplemented the CMT and its applied field is also extended to literature, law, medicine and other aspects, especially the application of the financial domain attracting more and more scholars' attention. However, the metaphor identification and conceptual metaphor mapping are often judged by the subjective method lacking of objective identification. Accordingly, more advanced conceptual metaphor identification tools are adopted to make a cognitive analysis on the conceptual metaphor used in financial report headlines in the thesis.In the paper, the CMT is taken as the theoretical framework and the headlines originating from the website of 21 st Century Business Herald, New York Times and American financial news channel CNBC are selected to establish the corpora. The metaphorical expressions are identified by Metaphor Identification Procedure(MIP) and the conceptual metaphor mappings are determined by vocabulary network(WordNet) and Suggested Upper Merged Ontology(SUMO). The study attempts to explore the typical conceptual metaphors based on self-constructed corpora and reveal the links among language, thinking and culture of the metaphor.It has been found that metaphors concerning human being, journey, war and space are used more frequently but there is a difference in terms of the degree of saliency of the shared conceptual metaphors. Accordingly, it is indicated that there are similarities and differences between the two cultures in financial domain in terms of conceptual metaphors. The similarities are derived from the similar bodily experience. However, the possible factors that lead to the differences in terms of the degree of saliency of the shared conceptual metaphors are the different cultures and ideologies of the two nations.