A Contrastive Analysis Of Economy And Trade Metaphors In Chinese And American Political Discourses

Through the ages,metaphorical phenomena have attracted a great deal attention from linguists.In 1980,the publication of Metaphors We Live By opened the door to a new world for metaphor research.Lakoff and Johnson believe that metaphors are ubiquitous in daily lives and are a way for human beings to think,behave and express ideas.Subsequently,metaphor studies have come to the stage of cross-disciplinary development.However,most of the early studies of cognitive metaphors are based on the researcher’s intuition,and the conclusions drawn are inevitably subjective.Therefore,the combination of metaphor research in cognitive linguistics and corpora can provide empirical evidence cognitive linguistic studies lack.More and more scholars devote themselves to the research on the discourse functions of metaphors by using corpus tools;therefore,metaphorical studies of political discourses started to appear and develop.The focus of this study is on metaphors in political discourses for diplomatic purposes,that is,the discourses produced by negotiations between countries.In contemporary state-to-state exchanges,“economy” and “trade” are two important key words.Based on two sub-corpora containing the speeches related to economy and trade topics published respectively by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S.Department of State from January 2016 to December 2019,this thesis aims to examine the target domain words “economy” and “trade” and analyze the similarities and differences between Chinese and American economy and trade metaphor patterns.The results show that in both Chinese and American sub-corpora,8 types of economy metaphors are identified: “economy is human”,“economy is life”,“economy is building”,and so on.The metaphors of “economy is ocean”,is the metaphor only found in the Chinese sub-corpus,while “economy is plant”and “economy is artwork” are only used in the American sub-corpus.7 types of trade metaphors,like “trade is human”,“trade is war”,are found in both Chinese and American sub-corpora.The metaphor of “trade is weapon” is only found in the Chinese sub-corpus,while “trade is plant” and “trade is sport” are metaphors in the American one.More human-oriented metaphors and less nature-oriented metaphors are found in the Chinese sub-corpus.The research findings confirm that the common human cognitive structures and the shaping by various social and cultural environments are the main reasons for the similarities and differences in economy and trade metaphors between Chinese and American sub-corpora.