Abstract
Metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool that can help to transmit marketing concept, and form effective marketing strategies. The conceptual metaphor of MARKETING IS JOURNEY has been viewed as a significant deep metaphor in the field of marketing all along. Based on five authoritative marketing textbooks and research articles of three high influencing factor journals in 2016, this paper builds a corpus of three million words. By virtue of previous studies, the author makes a check-list, and intends to explore the usage of JOURNEY metaphors in marketing English with the help of “Metaphor Identification Process (MIP)” (Steen at al. 2010) from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The results show that: (1) the productivity of CMTB is 64,209, which is much higher than that of CMJA, 32,184; (2) Themes of obstacles & facilitators, directions of journey, uphill & downhill, as well as fast & slow progress of journey are widely employed in marketing English, with marketing research articles laying more focus on the theme of directions of journey than textbooks; (3) similarities and differences between them can be explained by the contextual factors of field, tenor, and mode. Further implications includes that it can help to appeal to further revision of established marketing textbooks, for that the most cutting-edge metaphorical expressions, e.g., “memory block”, should be included in textbooks for better catching up with the latest development in the field of marketing.
Highlights
Conceptual metaphor theory holds that metaphor is a means of language rhetoric, and a ubiquitous way of thinking
RESULTS & ANALYSIS Productivity of JOURNEY metaphors used in Corpus of Marketing Textbooks (CMTB) and CMJA According to Charteris-Black (2004), the productivity of metaphors can be measured by resonance
Resonance is “an indication of the extent to which metaphor source domains are found in a particular corpus”, the statistical measure of which is that it is the sum of the tokens multiplied by the sum of the types of the metaphors that are from the same source domain. (Charteris-Black 2004:89)”
Summary
Conceptual metaphor theory holds that metaphor is a means of language rhetoric, and a ubiquitous way of thinking. As the basis of human’s cognition, thought, experience, language, and even behavior, metaphor is the main and basic way of human existence (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Metaphor consists of two domains: a source domain with relatively explicit structure and a target domain with relatively implicit structure. Metaphor is to map the schematic structure of the source domain to the target domain, so that we can construct and understand the target domain through the structure of the source domain (Lakoff 1993). LIFE is a relatively abstract concept and its structure is vague, so it is often described by means of JOURNEY to form the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS JOURNEY. Metaphorical mappings are not generated at random, but rooted in Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ)
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