| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系專班 === 98 === This is a corpus-based thesis which analyzes metaphors of financial linguistic expressions in newspaper headlines from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives during the global financial crisis in 2008. Using Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) and Grammatical Metaphor Analysis (Halliday, 1985) as analytical frameworks, this thesis aims at answering (1) What are the prototypical metaphors found in the financial news during the global financial crisis? (2) Do metaphor choices differ for specific economic issues? If so, how do they differ? If not, in what ways are they similar? (3) How does choice of metaphors reflect global capitalism nowadays?
The results show that (1) Human, nature, natural disasters, water and motion metaphors are found across financial linguistic expressions and among these, human metaphors are the most frequent. The source domain of human can be divided into smaller metaphor scenarios to project different human characteristics e.g., CAPITAL IS ACTIVE, CURRENCY IS DEVELOPMENT, STOCK MARKET IS EMOTIONAL and MARKET IS SENSITIVE. For grammatical metaphor analysis, human metaphors prefer to locate the target lexeme in a syntactic subject position; however, when a patient metaphor is chosen, the target lexemes prefer an grammatical object position. (2) Metaphors of de-personification include nature, natural disasters and water metaphors. It is found that jing3qi4 has a preference for nature metaphors, jin1rong2 for natural disaster metaphors and zi1jin1 for water metaphors. Compared with (1), finance metaphors prefer to place jin1rong2 in a syntactic modifier position, implying its unpredictability beyond human control. Zi1jin1 is evaluated as either neutral or negative, e.g., zi1jin1 fa4lan4資金氾濫 ‘too much capital,’ implying its subsequent negative effect. (3) Motion metaphors were not prominent during the financial crisis, but are used to concretize complex economic concepts. Three types of motion are discovered: Vertical motion, horizontal motion and dynamic motion. Vertical motion is mapped onto the increasing and decreasing of values, e.g., the appreciation and depreciation of currencies. Contrary to vertical motion, horizontal motion is related to the direction of the motion, e.g., the inflow and outflow of capital from an invested target as zi1jin1 zhuan3ru4 xin1xing1shi4chang3資金轉入新興市場 ‘capital is invested in emerging markets.’ In addition, it is found that vertical motion, which is an ever-changing, dynamic process, is extended from Orientational Metaphors UP IS GOOD, DOWN IS BAD. Therefore, DOWN IS BAD is not negative in financial reports. (4) The different choice of metaphors for financial linguistic expressions reflects the changes in the banking system that resulted in the financial crisis.
In sum, this thesis provides a critical approach to metaphor analysis which helps readers become aware of the motivation that underlies the choice of metaphors that could reflect the socio-cultural aspects of economic reality.
|
|---|
