MARKET Metaphors: Chinese, English and Malay

Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation. MARKET Metaphors: Chinese, English and Malay Siaw-Fong Chung Institute of Linguistics National Taiwan University No. 1, Sec 2, Roosevelt Road Taipei 106, Taiwan f91142002@ntu.edu.tw Abstract In this paper, MARKET metaphors used by different communities (Chinese, Malay and English) are laid out based on the frequency counts of these metaphors and their occurrences in different syntactic positions. The results show that certain types of metaphors have preferences for different syntactic positions for ‘market.’ For instance, MARKET IS A PERSON in all three languages prefers to place ‘market’ in the subject position. In addition to this finding, the choice of metaphor types by different speech communities may also reflect their perspectives regarding their country’s economy. This is evidenced by the fewer instances of MARKET IS COMPETITION in the English data. The instances that describe how the market falls (plunges and crashes) may reflect the speakers’ concerns with the maintenance of their power in the market rather than the competitiveness of their market. Therefore, through using quantitative data, this paper is able to infer the economic status of these speech communities. This can be done not only through analyzing the semantic meanings of the metaphors but also their interface with syntax. 1. Introduction Since Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM), many metaphor analyses have based their framework on this model. The CTM treats metaphors at the semantic level, i.e, a majority of the metaphorical instances such as He produces new idea at an astounding rate and His intellectual productivity has decreased in recent year (IDEAS ARE PRODUCTS) are understood based on the meanings of the mapped concepts (produces and productivity to IDEA) (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980:47). The syntactic functions of the words produces (verb) and productivity (noun) are not their major concerns in this model. Studies have been suggested to treat these lexemes more carefully at the syntactic level. Both Ahrens (2002) and Su (2000) suggested that the metaphorical instances can be viewed at three levels, i.e., entity (noun), quality (adjective) and function (verb). This is one approach that attempted to incorporate grammar into the CTM framework. Further research by Ahrens et al (2003) and Chung et al. (2003) worked around economy metaphors but their approach is still lexeme-based. In both these works, they searched for economy metaphors through identifying keywords surrounding the target term (such as growth for the target term economy) and calculated the frequency of these keywords in each conceptual metaphor. Although they separated the lexemes according to entity, quality and function, no much analysis was carried out towards the relationship between these grammatical roles and the lexemes. Work that concerns the most with metaphors and grammar was suggested by Halliday in 1985. In Halliday’s model, the concept of grammatical metaphor was introduced. Metaphors are divided into two types -- ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors. Ideational grammatical metaphor is concerned more with analyzing the transitivity of metaphors and whether these metaphors are congruent. For …

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