The purpose of this article is to unearth the deep cultural roots of conceptual metaphors in economic discourse. This article uses the conceptual metaphor of Lakoff and Johnson as the theoretical framework. The corpus is selected from the economic reports in the foreign economic journal "The Economist". The author selects a large number of expressions that are closely related to economic discourse. Combined, it will help us to broaden the field of metaphor research. Although metaphor has been studied from different angles, its research in economic discourse is not sufficient. This study conducted a detailed semantic and cognitive analysis of the selected corpus in an attempt to discover the cognitive mechanism of metaphor in economic discourse. Experiments show that four common animal metaphors are summarized: "Companies are animals" occupying 40% of metaphors, "Investors are animals" occupying 20% of metaphors, "Markets are animals" occupying 10% of metaphors, and "Products "Animals" account for 20% of metaphors. In the analysis of the four types of conceptual metaphors, the proportion of orientation metaphors accounts for 31%, the proportion of ontological metaphors accounts for 13%, and the proportion of structural metaphors accounts for 56%, which indicates that structural metaphors occupy a considerable number and absolute advantages.

Zhaojun Pang. Animal Metaphors in Economic Discourse. Zoology and Animal Physiology (2021), Vol. 2, Issue 3: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.38007/ZAP.2021.020301.

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