A Study On The Conceptual Metaphors In CEO Statements Of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Of Financial Enterprises

Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that metaphor is a cognitive way whose working mechanism is the system mapping between the source domains and target domains.It is deeply rooted in human language,culture and mind based on embodiment and similarity of human beings.As a unique language mechanism,metaphor is widely used in various discourses such as politics discourse,business discourse and economic discourse,etc.Meanwhile,the concepts in economic field are always abstract which can be reproduced by metaphors.And numerous metaphorical expressions exist in financial enterprises' corporate social responsibility(CSR)reports.The thesis adopts the qualitative method and corpus-based quantitative method to study the conceptual metaphors of CEO statements in CSR reports of financial enterprises by answering the following research questions:1)What are the key semantic domains in CEO statements of CSR reports of financial enterprises?2)What source domains are used to conceptualize the key semantic domains in CEO statements of CSR reports of financial enterprises?3)What are the conceptual metaphors in the target CEO statements? And what social responsibilities of financial enterprises do these conceptual metaphors reveal?The data are collected from Financial Enterprises' Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR)reports in the list of Fortune Global 500(2017).A corpus(85,203 words)of CEO statements in 90 CSR reports of financial enterprises is constructed.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)(Lakoff & Johnson,1980/2003),the thesis uses Wmatrix3.0 and MIPVU to analyze the self-built corpus and the results are as follows:1)The top six semantic domains are “Business: Generally”,“Money and pay”,“Helping”,“Business: Selling”,“Belonging to a group”,and “Time: Beginning”.These semantic domains reveal the main idea in CEO statements of CSR reports of financial enterprises that corporations serve society and investors,and fulfill their social responsibilities,which promotes the sustainable development of financial corporations.2)In CEO statements,the source domains used to conceptualize the key semantic domains are BODY,ART,EMOTION,COLOR,FOOD,PLANT,COLTHES,ENTERTAINMENT,TIME,WAR,GOVERNMENT,POLITICS,SCIENCE AND TECHONOLGY,ARCHITECTURE,MOVEMENT,MEASUREMENT,OBJECTS,SOCIAL ACTIONS,LINGUISTIC ACTIONS,PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTIONS,WEATHER,and GEOGRAPHY.3)Based on the above-mentioned key semantic domains and source domains,three main conceptual metaphors are constructed: CORPORATION IS PEOPLE,CORPORATION IS COOPERATION,and CORPORATION IS COMPETITION.The selection and use of metaphors such as personal pronouns(we,our),group words(team,cooperation,partners)and war expressions(war,win-win),to some extent,can reflect the economic visions of financial enterprises.The conceptual metaphors in the corpus reveal financial enterprises' four major corporate social responsibilities: economic responsibility,environmental responsibility,human rights responsibility,and charity responsibility.Fulfilling these responsibilities can enhance the competitiveness of financial enterprises and contribute to the healthy and sustainable development of financial enterprises.