Abstract
The economic media discourse depends upon a complex web of metaphors, among which WAR metaphor is worthy of special attention. The data used in this study is comprised of 2566 articles (about 1.2 million words) under the Economy column of China Daily published in 2014. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) is used as the analytical framework to investigate WAR metaphor in the economic media discourse. This study is governed by the three steps of CMA including metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. The results show that among the selected 62 lemmas, 40 of them have metaphorical instantiations and more than half of all the metaphorical expressions are nouns. Both social resources and individual resources influence metaphor choice. WAR metaphor has the rhetorical function as persuasion, which constructs the cognitive model of competition in the mind of the readers and arouses their emotions; on the other hand, it hides the cooperative principle of economic activities.
Highlights
Metaphor was traditionally viewed as fanciful decoration that adorns literary texts and high-flown rhetorical speeches which was based on the resemblance between two entities, a characteristic of language alone rather than thought or action
Building on previous studies in this line of research, this paper aims to investigate the typical WAR metaphor in economic media discourse
The 1.2-million-word corpus of Business Media Discourse consists of 2566 articles collected from the Business Economy column of ChinaDaily.com, the most influential newspaper issued in the mainland China, which has gathered the year 2014’s most newsworthy China stories
Summary
Metaphor was traditionally viewed as fanciful decoration that adorns literary texts and high-flown rhetorical speeches which was based on the resemblance between two entities, a characteristic of language alone rather than thought or action. Most people assume that one must have a special talent to be able to use metaphor, and only great poets or eloquent speakers can be its masters. This entrenched view has been challenged by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) who outlined “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” (CMT). An important notion in CMT is the conceptual domain which can be viewed as any coherent organization of experience. Metaphor is defined as conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, or more TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN (Lakoff, 1993). We have coherently organized knowledge about journey that we rely on in understanding life, leading to a common conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY
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