Study of Metaphor in Economic Journalistic Articles.docx

1、Study of Metaphor in Economic Journalistic ArticlesStudy of Metaphor in English Economic Journalistic Articles1. Introduction 12. Significance of study of metaphor in economic reports 23Theories of metaphors related to this thesis 33.1 Definitions of metaphors 33.2 Conceptual metaphor theory 43.3 Me

2、taphor mapping theories 53.4 Metaphors in economic articles 64Classification of metaphor in economic journalistic articles 64.1 Orientational metaphors 64.2 ontological metaphors 84.3 Structural metaphors 95. Main mapping models in economic articles 105.1 Journey metaphor mapping model 105.2 War met

3、aphor mapping model 115.3 Person metaphor mapping model 126. Conclusions 12Reference 13Acknowledgements 151. Introduction For a long time, metaphor has been studied as a mere language phenomenon by linguists. With the development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, there has been increas

4、ing interest in the use of metaphor in many areas, especially economics and business. As a result, metaphor in economics has received great attention both from applied linguists and economists. The latter group focuses on explicating the extended use of metaphor or the dominant metaphoric themes. Wh

5、ile the former group puts more emphasis on a more linguistic, discursive analysis of economic texts, from which they can find out metaphoric expressions, as well as their typical distribution and communicative function. The primary objective of the current study is to deepen and enrich the contempor

6、ary study of metaphor in economic reports from the angle of cognitive science. To achieve this objective, analysis of metaphor in economic journalistic articles is carried out. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to help better understand the abstract concepts involved in economic articles though th

7、e discussion of metaphor used. 2. Significance of study of metaphor in economic reportsAs a senior lecturer in University of Birmingham, while teaching formal economics to students who speak English as a second or foreign language, Willie Henderson was wondering if there was any way of accelerating

8、students understanding of this abstract subject, or of its linguistic expression. The answer to this question was that there was. Abstract as those concepts are, it might be easier to get the meanings when associating them with some concrete terms. Then it comes to the problem: which kind of discour

9、se should be chosen as the target, formal published economics textbooks or daily economic reports? In fact, the typical metaphorical words and phrases mentioned in the journalistic articles are from the textbooks. Moreover, the data of economic metaphors is enlarging as a result of the rapid speed o

10、f economic, social and scientific development. Besides, not everyone is available to an economics textbook while it is fairly easy for people to get a piece of newspaper or listen to the news in which economic news is indispensable. By studying the metaphors in economic reports, researchers give a d

11、atabase to the widespread readers for reference when they come across the difficulty in understanding certain metaphors. And the database is occasionally revised, well and advance. This thesis primarily discusses metaphors in the journalistic economic articles. And the aim of this thesis is to help

12、people get to understand what the economic articles are talking about and what the current economy is going on. By obtaining the application of metaphors, people might further form an economic way of thinking. This paper sets to discuss the metaphor in journalistic articles. To pursue this, theories

13、 related to this thesis should be studied.3Theories of metaphors related to this thesisBefore the emergency and development of the cognitive linguistics, metaphor was merely recognized as a dominant and widespread linguistic phenomenon as how we express things, used as a tool of decorating language.

14、 As cognitive linguistics gradually gains its reputation, more and more researches are launched on it, which brings the extension of the definition of metaphor. From the view of cognitive linguistics, metaphor has become a cognitive phenomenon as how we understand things. 3.1 Definitions of metaphor

15、sAs for the study on metaphor, it can be traced back to as early as two thousand years ago when Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric started the study of metaphor in history. He defined metaphor as “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else”, which is taken up in the Oxford English Dic

16、tionary (1989) definition “a figure of speech in which a descriptive term is transferred to some object to which it is not properly applicable”. He pointed out that metaphor, as a figure of speech, mainly appears in literature, particularly in poems. There are three essential elements in Aristotles

17、notion of metaphor which were later referred to by other scholars, the original idea or context (the topic), that with which it is compared or the borrowed idea or notion (the vehicle) and the basis for such a comparison or the shared elements (the grounds). So, for example, in a metaphor such as TI

18、ME IS MONEY, TIME is the topic, MONEY is the vehicle, and one of the grounds is: it is valuable, under which time, just like money, can be spent, used and brought etc. The 20th century has seen the development of the cognitive theory of metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) when a large amount of em

19、pirical studies are launched on the use of metaphors in social sciences. They have found that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. They put forward the conceptual metaphor theory which defines conceptual metaphor refers the understanding of one idea

20、 in terms of anther. Conceptual metaphor, along with the linguistic metaphor, has been widely and commonly used in social sciences, including economics, linguistics and politics. Many definitions as mentioned, much of the difficulty in defining metaphor originates in the problem of whether it is bes

21、t considered as a cognitive phenomenon related to how we understand things or as a linguistic phenomenon related to how we express them (Cameron & Low, 1999). Therefore, Jonathan Charteris-Black and Timothy Ennis conclude that the problems of defining metaphor arise from the complexity of the relati

22、onship between thought and language.3.2 Conceptual metaphor theoryConceptual metaphor theory, put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, is among the most influential theories in the cognitive approach to metaphors. The basic statements of Lakoff and Johnsons theories in their book Metaphors We Live By are

23、summarized as follows (from Lan Chun, 2005):(1) Metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous. One can not get along perfectly well without it.(2) Metaphor is conceptual in nature. Metaphor is not just a language, but also thought and action. Our conceptual system is fundamental metaphorical.(3) The essence

24、of metaphor is in understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of anther.(4) Metaphor is composed of two domains, a relatively more clearly structured source domain and relatively less clearly structured target domain. Metaphor is a mapping from the schematic structures of the source do

25、main to that of the target domain. This mechanism enables us to understand unfamiliar or abstract things in terms of more familiar and concrete objects.(5) Metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary but are grounded in our bodily experience. Once a metaphorical mapping is set up, it will then impose it

26、s structure on real life and be made real in different ways.3.3 Metaphor mapping theories Based on the empirical studies, Boers (2002) found out TRADE IS WAR metaphor is pretty pervasive when talking about economy and business. He then put forward conceptual metaphor mapping model in some economic a

27、rticles and applied it to the teaching of economics. Based on our daily experience, metaphors come into being and function through the interaction of two conceptual domains: the source domain and the target domain. In order to explain how the interaction forms, Lakoff and Johnson come up with the Ma

28、pping Theory, which refers the transition from the source domain to the target domain. In other words, metaphor mapping is the projection of one source domain onto one target domain. For instance, in the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, journey is the source domain and life is the target domain. When und

29、erstanding the given metaphor, certain characteristics or aspects of the source domain, journey, are projected onto the target domain, life. So the following sentences are very popular. (1) I am at the crossroad in my life.(2) He has a good start in his life.(3) His life is full of difficulty.Gilles

30、 Fauconnier (1944), a French linguist and a professor at the University of California, developed the mapping theory of Lakoff and Johnson and put forward cross-domain mapping through which people get to know the unfamiliar via the familiar. The fundamental idea of metaphor mapping is to use the stru

31、cture of the source domain and the corresponding vocabulary to talk about or comprehend the target domain.3.4 Metaphors in economic articlesThere have been many studies of different aspects of economics discourse in recent years. For example, Willie Hendersons Metaphor in Economics published in The

32、Economist is regarded as the first works that studies the metaphor in economics. In this article, Henderson focused on the application of metaphor in economics. McCloskey (1983) and Mason (1990) point out that economics texts in particular are heavily metaphorical. For instance, the economy is conceptualized as an organism, market movements as physical movements and sharp downward market movements as natural disasters. Even, some metaphors have evolved and become established, like meltdown, cash flow etc.4Classification of metaphor in economic journalistic articlesBased on the conceptua