Abstract
This paper compares the use of war metaphors in English and Chinese business discourse. A major goal is to investigate the morphological structure and mappings of war metaphors in business discourse in the two different languages. For instance, the compound price war in English is a competitive business attempt to drive down prices of commodities. The compound marketing war is different in that it is a competitive activity with competing firms to gain the most market shares. Similar expressions can also be found in Chinese. The study also finds that English and Chinese do share some of the war metaphors in their description of business activities, such as their use of terms denoting attack and aggression. However, Chinese employs more terms to describe different kinds of war, which reflects their more detailed schema of the concept of war. The war terms used in the English corpus are less diversified and the English ‘war’ or ‘battle’ is frequently waged against inflation and speculations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 7th International Free Linguistics Conference |
| Editors | Elaine ESPINDOLA, Abhishek Kumar KASHYAP |
| Place of Publication | Hong Kong |
| Publisher | Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| Pages | 182-187 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9789623677790 |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |