基于语料库的商务英语语篇中的战争隐喻研究

War Metaphors in Business English Discourse: A Study Based on Corpus

在认知隐喻理论的框架内,以自建的小型商务英语语料库为基础,揭示隐喻"商务即战争"(BUSINESS IS WAR)在商务语篇中的表现形态,并在Halliday语域学说的视角下,进行了商务语篇与政治语篇的对比分析。我们发现,战争隐喻在商务语篇中构成了严密、完整、和谐的语义网络系统,极大地支持了商务英语语篇信息的构建和传达。与政治语篇相比,商务语篇的隐喻密度很小,源始域倾向于战争策略、靶等战争外围概念,而非杀戮、战斗等核心概念。造成这种差异的主要是语域学说中的语场和语式元素,与语旨没有关联。

Within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson, the present study explores the WAR metaphors in a mini Corpus of Business English. It is found that the corpus contains various WAR metaphors, which form a coherent, correlated semantic network. Compared with political discourse, the metaphor density of the corpus is quite low, and the selected source domains tend to be such peripheral conceptions of war as STRATEGY, TARGET rather than such core notions of war as KILLING and FIGHT. The difference results from the notions of field and mode ofre^ister theory, rather than tenor.