Cross-linguistic comparisons of the market metaphors

Abstract

Two research questions are examined in this work regarding the uses of ‘market’ in Mandarin, Malay and English. The first question asks whether the use of ‘market’ in these three languages is similar or different. The second question asks whether the collocates of the ‘market’ are similar or different across these languages when used in different grammatical relations. Implications of the similarities and differences will be discussed. In order to answer these two questions, ‘market’ metaphors used by different communities are laid out based on the frequency counts of its source domains and the collocates according to different grammatical roles (subject, object, modifier, etc.) of ‘market.’ The results show that certain source domains have preferences for different grammatical roles for ‘market.’ In addition to this finding, the choice of source domains by different speech communities may also reflect their perspectives regarding their country's economy. Therefore, through using quantitative data, this paper is able to infer the perspectives of these speech communities when referring to ‘market’ in their languages. This can be done not only through analyzing the semantic meanings of the metaphors, but also through their interface with grammatical relations.