| Metaphor is considered as a cognitive system whose working mechanism is the mapping between the target domains and source domains.Metaphor is widely used in different discourses such as politics discourse,economic discourse,business discourse,etc.The mission statement,a kind of business genre,builds the corporate identity via metaphor uses.The thesis aims to investigate the metaphor use in Chinese and US mission statements through by addressing the following research questions:1)What are the key semantic domains in Chinese and US corporate mission statements?2)What source domains are used to conceptualize the key semantic domains in Chinese and US corporate mission statements?What are the differences of their source domains in Chinese and US corporate mission statements,if any?3)What corporate identities of Chinese and US companies do these metaphors reveal respectively?The data are collected from the missions statements in the list of Fortune Global 500(2016).A corpus of Chinese corporate mission statements(70 pieces,42548 words)and a corpus of US corporate mission statements(70 pieces,4142 words)are constructed.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory(CMT)of Lakoff and Johnson(1980/2003),this thesis uses the Wmatrix 3.0 semantic coding function and MIPVU to analyze the selected corpus and obtain the following findings and results:1)The top six semantic domains in Chinese mission statements are "Business:Generally","Change","Science and technology in general","Helping","Industry"and "Business:Selling".The top six semantic domains in US mission statements are"Business:Selling","Helping","Business:Generally","Pronouns","Important" and"Work and employment:Generally".The three shared semantic domains are"Business:Generally","Business:Selling" and "Helping",which reflect the main idea in mission statements that companies provide their products and services for the customers.2)In both Chinese and US mission statements,the shared source domains used to conceptualize the key semantic domains are BODY,WAR,ARCHITECTURE,MONEY,MOVEMENT,MEASUREMENT,OBJECT,SOCIAL ACTIONS,TIME,PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTIONS,POLITICS,CLOTHES and GEOGRAPHY.The source domains specific to Chinese mission statements are ART,FOOD,PLANT,LINGUISTIC ACTIONS,WEATHER,SPORT,COLOR and EMOTION.Those specific to US mission statements are PEOPLE,DRAMA,LIVING CREATURE and SCIENCE AND TECHONOLOGY.Based on the above source domains,three main conceptual metaphors are constructed:BUSINESS IS PEOPLE,BUSINESS IS COOPERATION and BUSINESS IS COMPETITION.The number of metaphors used in the Chinese corporate mission statements is greater than that in the US corporate mission statements.3)In terms of the corporate identity revealed from the metaphors used,Chinese companies seem to be more competition-oriented by describing themselves as energetic leaders and strong competitors,while the US companies seem to be more cooperation-oriented by attaching more importance to group and affiliation. |
