文档介绍：On the Use of Metaphors in the Language of Business, Finance and Economics
Éva Kovács
1. Introduction
As the title of my paper suggests, my primary aim is to investigate how metaphors are manifested in business discourse. Besides, I will give a brief insight into the discourse functions of metaphors in business English as well.
As a way of introduction, let us have a closer look at the term ‘metaphor’. Hearing the word ’metaphor’, we usually think of a monly used by poets for aesthetic and rhetorical purposes.
As a rhetorical device, a metaphor is described by Fowler (1987: 144) like this:
„In general, a metaphor ascribes to some thing or action X a property Y which it could not literally possess in that context”.
The American poet, Robert Frost (1874-1963) is notably a poet of metaphors more than anything else. To Frost, metaphor is really what poetry is all about. In his essay entitled Education by Poetry, Frost (1931) says the following:
"Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace metaphors,' and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, 'Why don't you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or from some other instinct".
Later on Frost goes on to argue that „all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all thinking except scientific thinking”. This observation of Frost’s seems to be reflected in the cognitive theory of metaphors, and it will also be of great importance in my analysis as it justifies the central points I will make in my study.
Now let us look at the central idea in one of Frost’s poems entitled The Road Not Taken (1916) (cf. Baym, Gottesman, Holland, Karlstone, Murphy, Parker, Pritchard & Wallace, 1989):
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And