Power and gender
Metaphors in mergers and acquisitions texts in a Chinese financial newspaper
This study investigates metaphors used in mergers and acquisitions texts in a Chinese financial newspaper,
The 21st Century Business Herald. Based on corpus data, we approach the rhetorical motive and persuasive
power hidden behind metaphors from the perspective of rhetorical criticism. The study found four major metaphors: war,
marriage, struggle and hunting, and game, in the financial texts about mergers and acquisitions. The war metaphor is the
most common variety, followed by the marriage metaphor, suggesting the role of power perception and gender perception in
the representation of financial affairs.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data and methods
- 3.Results and analysis
- 3.1Results
- 3.2Textual analysis
- Metaphor of war
- Metaphor of marriage
- Metaphor of struggle and hunting
- Metaphor of game
- 3.3Features of four metaphors in M&As texts
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References
References (70)
References
Ahrens, K., & Chung, S. F. 2019. “Metaphor in Chinese.” In Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics, edited by C-R. Huang, Z. Jing-Schmidt, and B. Meiterernst, 364–378. London: Routledge.
Boeynaems, A., Burgers, C., Konijn, E. A., and Steen, G. J. 2017. The effects of metaphorical framing on political persuasion: A systematic literature review. Metaphor and Symbol, 32(2): 118–134.
Boss Zhipin. 2020. Research on Gender Income Differences in China’ Job Market in 2020. Retrieved from [URL]
Burke, K. 1989. On Symbols and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Cameron, L., & Maslen, R. 2010. Metaphor Analysis. London: Equinox.
Campbell, K., & Burkholder, T. R. 1997. Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric (Second Edition). New York: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Chang, J. F., & Wang, Y. Y. 2014. A corpus-based study of metaphors in Chinese reports on bonds and future market. Foreign Language Research 11: 343–344.
Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Charteris-Black, J. 2012. Shattering the bell jar: Metaphor, gender and depression. Metaphor and Symbol 31: 199–216.
Charteris-Black, J. 2014. Analyzing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Chen, M., & Tan, Y. 2010. A study of M&As metaphor in Chinese texts and English texts on the basis of a corpus approach. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching 31: 16–20.
Chen, M., & Deng, Z. 2012. Marriage metaphors in economic discourse on mergers and acquisitions: A research on metaphor from the socio-cognitive perspective. Foreign Language and Literature 51: 72–76.
Chilton, P. A. 1996. Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Chung, S. F.; Ahrens, K., & Sung, Y. H. 2003. “Stock markets as ocean water: A corpus-based, comparative study of Mandarin Chinese, English and Spanish.” Paper presented at 17th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. October, 3. Sentosa, Singapore.
Fitzgibbon, E., & Seeger, W. 2002. Audiences and metaphors of globalization in the Daimler-Chrysler AG merger. Communication Studies 11: 40–55.
Flusberg, S. J.; Matlock, T., & Thibodeau, P. H. 2018. War metaphors in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 11: 1–18.
Forceville, C. 1994. Pictorial metaphor in advertisements, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 9(1):1–29.
Gibbs, R. W. 2014. “Conceptual metaphor in thought and social action.” In The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, edited by Landau, M., Robinson, M., & Meier, B., 17–40. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Guo, S. 2013. Metaphor studies from the perspective of critical discourse analysis: A case study of business acquisition. Theory and Practice in Language Studies 31: 475–481.
Henderson, W. 2000. Metaphor, economics and ESP: Some comments. English for Specific Purposes 21: 167–73.
Herrera, H., & White, M. 2012. Metaphor and Mills: Figurative Language in Business and Economics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Hirsch, P. M., & Andrews, J. A. Y. 1983. “Ambushes, shootouts, and Knights of the Round Table: The language of corporate takeovers.” In Organizational Symbolism, Monographs in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations, edited by Pondy, L. R., Frost, P. J., Morgan, G., & Dandridge, T. C., 145–155. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.
Jing-Schmidt, Z. 2016. “Metaphor in Chinese: Cognition, culture, and society.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language, edited by Chan, S. W., 629–644. London: Routledge.
Jing-Schmidt, Z., & Peng, X. 2018. The sluttified sex: Verbal misogyny reflects and reinforces gender order in wireless China. Language in Society 31: 385–408.
Jing-Schmidt, Z., & Peng, X. J. 2017. Winds and tigers: Metaphor choice in China’s anti-corruption discourse. Lingua Sinica 11: 1–26.
Koller, V. 2004. Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koller, V. 2002. A shotgun wedding: Co-occurrence of war and marriage metaphors in mergers and acquisitions discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 31: 179–203.
Koller, V. 2005. Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: Evidence from business media discourse. Discourse & Society 21: 199–224.
Koller, V. 2006. “Of critical importance: Using electronic text corpora to study metaphor in business media discourse.” In Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, edited by Stefanowitsch, A., & Griees, S., 237–266. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Koller, V. 2014. Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Study. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Kӧvecses, Z. 2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Second Edition). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kӧvecses, Z. 2015. Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kӧvecses, Z. 2020. Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G.; Espenson, J., and Schwartz, A. 1991. Master Metaphor List (Second draft copy). Cognitive Linguistics Group, University of California Berkeley.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 2014. Don’t Think of An Elephant (2nd edition). Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Lindsey, W. 2005. Religion and the good Life: Motivation, myth and metaphor in a Tokugawa female lifestyle guide. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, (1): 35–52.
Liu, L. A.; Adair, W. L., and Bello, D. C. 2015. Fit, misfit, and beyond fit: Relational metaphors and semantic fit in international joint ventures. Journal of International Business Studies 71: 830–849.
Liu, W. Y., & Wang, Y. J. 2020. The role of offensive metaphors in Chinese diplomatic discourse. Discourse, Context and Media, 371: 1–10.
Lule, J. 2004. War and its metaphors: News language and the prelude to war in Iraq. Journalism Studies, 5(2): 179–190.
Maass, A.; Suitner, C., and Arcuri, L. 2014. “The role of metaphors in intergroup relations.” In The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, edited by Landau, M., Robinson, M., & Meier, B., 153–177. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Musolff, A. 2004. Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mutari, E. 2018. Metaphors, social practices, and economic life: ASE presidential address. Review of Social Economy 11: 1–18.
National Bureau of Statistics. 2019. The Statistical Monitoring Report of the Program for the Development of Chinese Women (2011–2020) in 2018. Retrieved from [URL]
Ottati, V.; Renstrom, R., and Price, E. 2014. “The metaphoric framing model: Political communication and public opinion.” In The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, edited by Landau, M., Robinson, M., & Meier, B., 179–202. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Regine, B.; Helene, M., & Angelika, S. 2012. The stepfamily metaphor: Further insights and alternations for understanding the M&As discourse. European Journal of International Management 21: 395–420.
Rennie, B. 2009. Myths, models and metaphors: Religion as model and philosophy of science. Religion, 39(4): 340–347.
Rottig, D. 2013. A marriage metaphor model for sociocultural integration in international mergers and acquisitions. Thunderbird International Business Review 41: 439–451.
Santa, A. 1999. Like an animal I was treated: Anti-immigrant metaphor in U. S. public discourse. Discourse & Society, 10(2): 191–224.
Schmid, H. J. 2012. (ed.) Cognitive Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Semino, E. 2008. Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shu, D. F. 2000. Studies in Metaphor. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Simons, H. W. 2004. “The rhetorical legacy of Kenneth Burke.” In A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Jost, W., & Olmsted, W., 151–167. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Sun, Y. 2020. Ideological and political metaphor and metaphorical ideology and politics-Reform narrative in the great 40 years. Journal of Northeast Normal University 41: 68–77.
Sundar, A., & Theodore, J. N. 2014. Place the logo high or low? Using conceptual metaphors of power in packaging design. Journal of Marketing, 78(5): 138–151.
The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. 2019. Equality, Development and Sharing: Progress of Women’s Cause in 70 Years Since New China’s Founding. Retrieved from [URL]. 2019-09-21.
Vaara, E.; Tienari, J., and Säntti, R. 2003. The international match: Metaphors as vehicles of social identity-building in cross-border mergers. Human Relations 41: 419–451.
Wang, C. 2017. Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese Advertisement: Case Studies of Household Appliance Advertisements from 1981 to 1996. Singapore: Springer.
Wang, W. 2003. On the cultural function of metaphor. Journal of Central China Normal University 41: 117–122.
Wen, X. 2014. Political discourse and political metaphors. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 91: 11–16.
White, M. 1997. The use of metaphor in reporting financial market transactions. Cuadernos de Filología Inglesa 6121: 233–245.
White, M., & Herrera, H. 2003. “Metaphor and ideology in the press coverage of telecom corporate consolidations.” In Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings, edited by Dirven, R., Frank, R., & Pütz, M., 277–323. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Whitt, J. 2011. An appetite for metaphor: Food imagery and cultural identity in Indian fiction. Ph. D. dissertation. East Carolina University.
Xiang, L. 2008. Conceptual integration and social functions of war metaphors in American sports reports. Ph.D. dissertation. Southwest Jiaotong University.
Zhong, C. B., & House, J. D. 2014. “Pollution and purity: A metaphoric perspective on morality.” In The Power of Metaphor: Examining Its Influence on Social Life, edited by Landau, M., Robinson, M., & Meier, B., 109–131. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Li, Ke & Qian Zhang
2024.
Chasm and net: metaphors in elder-related texts in a Chinese economic newspaper.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.