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Title:
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Metaphor Clusters in Business Media Discourse: A social cognition approach
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Author:
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Veronika Koller
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/koller/index.htm
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Degree Awarded:
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Vienna University
, Department of English
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Degree Date:
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2003
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Discourse Analysis
Semantics
Text/Corpus Linguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Herbert Schendl
Wolfgang Obenaus
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Abstract:
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Combining critical language study with cognitive semantics, this thesis looks at how metaphor usage in business media texts on a) marketing and b) mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is linked to discourse and cognition as well as to the socio-economic framework these are embedded in.
The study is based on two purpose-built machine-readable corpora of texts from British and US businessmagazines and newspapers. These were first subjected to computer-assisted quantitative analysis to search for metaphoric usage of items from previously established lexical fields (war, sports and games for marketing as well as evolutionary struggle--sub-divided into fighting, mating and feeding --for M&A). The quantitative results then served as the starting point for a qualitative functional grammar analysis of sample texts, which in turn resulted in assumed socio-cognitive models underlying the two discourses.
The analyses show that in quantitative terms, metaphorical expressions of war/fighting dominate both discourses, followed by sports and mating and then games and feeding, resp. In addition, the dominant metaphors are also qualitatively supported by the other metaphors in the clusters, with alternative romance (marketing) or dancing (M&A) metaphors being either marginalized or co-opted into the dominant cluster.
Discussed critically, the features of business media discourse thus ascertained are seen as originating from and impacting on cognition and the wider socio-economic sphere by reifiying business as a male-defined social practice.
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