A Cognitive Analysis on Conceptual Metaphor in English Economic Discourse

As one of the major theories in cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor has received lots of attention from scholars at home and abroad since it was first brought up. Metaphor is a cross-domain mapping from one concrete conceptual domain to another. Cognitive linguists recognize that metaphor converts complex and abstract concepts into intuitive and specific concepts, which is conducive to the understanding of abstract concepts and conducting abstract thinking. This is also why conceptual metaphor was widely used in economic discourse utilizing familiar concepts to help people comprehend abstract and obscure economic concepts. Based on the related theories of cognitive linguistics, taking economic passages about Chinese economy and business activities in The Economist as an example, this paper aims to find out and analyze some representative conceptual metaphors describing Chinese economy in economic discourse by the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis with the hope to help ESP learners with their learning of economic discourse.