A Corpus-based Study On Conceptual Metaphors In China Column Of The Economist

The study of metaphor has a long history.The traditional metaphor studies regard metaphor as a rhetorical device.American linguists Lakoff and Johnson study metaphor from a cognitive perspective,conceptual metaphors are regarded as not only a figure of speech but also a way of thinking.The concept metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson has milestone significance in metaphor research.Since then,there are numerous studies on conceptual metaphors.Domestic scholars analyze conceptual metaphors in different discourses,investigate the application of conceptual metaphor in SLA and foreign language teaching from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Among them,the conceptual metaphor in economic discourse has also attracted the attention of researchers.However,this kind of research mostly analyzes the qualitative analysis of a single discourse,or using a certain kind of conceptual metaphor.Therefore,this thesis takes Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory as a theoretical framework to study the conceptual metaphors in China Column of The Economist.This thesis aims to address the following research questions:(1)What categories of conceptual metaphors are employed in China Column of The Economist?(2)How do these conceptual metaphors realize their working mechanism?(3)Why are these three categories of conceptual metaphors in China Column of The Economist employed differently? In order to address three research questions,this thesis selecting the articles from China Column of The Economist in 2016 with 78416 words.Both qualitative and quantitative method are adopted in the thesis.Corpus instruments EDIT PAD PRO 7 and AntConc are employed to process data,construct corpus and analyze frequency.Through keywords retrieving,conceptual metaphors in China Column of The Economist are analyzed.The results show that:(1)In the self-constructed corpus,structural metaphor,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor are all employed.This thesis selects JOURNEY metaphor,WAR metaphor and HEALTH metaphor that are used in the structural metaphor for analysis and discussion.In the orientation metaphor,the UP-DOWN metaphor is selected;in the ontological metaphor,CONSTRUCTION metaphor is selected for analyzing.Through the retrieval and analysis of the five concrete conceptual metaphors above,theresults show that the orientation metaphor is used at the highest frequency of 48.20%.Secondly,the frequency of structural metaphor is 43.19%.The frequency of ontological metaphor is lower than the former two with the frequency of 8.61%.(2)The five concrete types of conceptual metaphors appearing in this corpus realize their meanings by the work mechanism that are partial mapped from the source domain to the target domain.(3)The reasons of frequency differences among structural metaphors,ontological metaphors and orientation metaphors in this study are related to the systematicity,cultural coherence of metaphors and the characteristics of economic discourse.This study enriches the study of conceptual metaphors in economic discourse by studying the conceptual metaphor appearing in the China column of The Economist.It hopes to help readers improve their vocabulary awareness and textual awareness,especially for L2 learners and ESP learners.