Stock Markets as Ocean Water : A Corpus-based, Comparative Study of Mandarin Chinese, English and Spanish

To what degree do different languages share similar conceptual metaphors? Charteris-Black and Ennis (2001) examined this question by running a comparative, corpus-based study of metaphors in Spanish and English financial reporting. They argue that both languages show considerable similarity in the choice of conceptual metaphors with the same linguistic expressions but that there is a differing degree of frequency. They attribute this similarity to the common cultural identity of the two languages such as the similar economic system and their Latinate origins. In this paper, we use a corpus-based approach in comparing the choice of conceptual metaphors in Mandarin Chinese with those of Spanish and English. We focus our discussion on the conceptual metaphor STOCK MARKET IS OCEAN WATER in Mandarin Chinese and compare it with the Spanish and English data. We carry out our analysis within the framework of the Conceptual Mapping (CM) Model (Ahrens 2002). With this model, we are able to demonstrate that although different languages share similar conceptual metaphors, they differ in what is mapped linguistically. These differences can be shown in their specific Mapping Principles.