- Email: [email protected]
Developing Business Students’ Linguistic and Intercultural Competence through the Understanding of Business Metaphors
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
3rd World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Educational Leadership (WCLTA-2012)
Developing business students` linguistic and intercultural competence through the understanding of business metaphors Crina Herteg *, Teodora Popescu 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, 11-13 Nicolae Iorga Street, Alba Iulia, 510009, Romania
Abstract Business students are not fully aware of the intrinsic relation between language and culture, applied to business language genre. Business English language as a genre in itself has been widely analyzed and debated in specialist literature, as extensive research has been carried out in the field of teaching English for Specific Purposes, specialists having centered on finding the best methods to teach students how to use the business language correctly and appropriately, with clear focus on the notionalfunctional aspect. However, less research has been done in the intrinsic nature of business English. The aim of this study is to prove that cognitive metaphors are instantiations of cultural categories manifested in the language spoken by the community that shares a common set of characteristics within a given cultural matrix. Our theory will be applied to contemporary business journalese in English and Romanian and we will try to identify universal metaphors and metaphor variations assignable to cultural characteristics of contemporary Romanian and British business reality reflected in the written press. © Authors.byPublished Elsevier Ltd. and peer review under the responsibility of Prof. Dr. Ferhan Odabaşı © 2013 2012The Published Elsevierby Ltd. Selection Selection and peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Ferhan Odabaşı Keywords: cognitive metaphors; culture; business English;
1. Introduction The present paper is the result of an experiment which was conducted at 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia with MA students in language and communication in business administration. The students subject to the experiment had to incorporate two parallel bilingual corpora (one in Romanian and one in English) with the aim of facilitating contrastive analysis. The students were provided with a list of key words (crisis, investor, money, investment, salary/wage, EU funds, economy, debt, politicians, business, job, pension, work, inflation and their Romanian equivalents) and they had to operate the selection of newspaper articles from Romanian and British business press. Students had to conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses, identify cognitive metaphors, and find similarities and differences between the English and Romanian conceptual categories. The project was scheduled during the second semester and lasted 14 weeks. The selection of students was made according to their level of knowledge in comparative linguistics. Each student had different manners of approaching the analysis, out of all students involved in the experiment six case studies will be presented in our paper. The tool used by the students, ConcApp, helped them identify words and their contextual preferences.
* Crina Herteg Tel.: +40-0744572775 E-mail address: [email protected].
1877-0428 © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Ferhan Odabaşı doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.09.334
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
1081
2 . L iterature review In her studies, Popescu (2007, 2011) reinforces the difference between business English and general English: “Business English seems to be much more complex than any other area of ESP, especially considering the need for an interface with the general public” (p.20). In her research, Popescu resorts to authentic sources and tackles the problem from a methodological point of view, providing business English teachers with valuable tools in teaching the subject. This experiment comes as a continuation as well as a reinforcement of the Popescu’s above-mentioned theory. The qualitative analysis allowed us to provide descriptive information about the results that cannot be presented strictly quantitatively. Another point for our endeavours is the seminal work Metaphors we live by, published in 1980 by Lakoff and Johnson, whose theory of conceptual metaphor has opened endless vistas for subsequent research and debate. The basic assumption of this theory is that metaphor is not only a stylistic feature of language, but thought itself is metaphorical in nature. Thus, the conceptual structure of metaphors rests on correspondences or mappings between conceptual domains. These mappings function in a natural way, as some of them are already existent in the human mind emerging from background cultural knowledge, as different kinds of similarities between concepts. Further on, Kövecses (2005) argues that the cognitive view of metaphor can simultaneously account for both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought. He has proved that certain conceptual metaphors (for anger, time, event structure, and the self) are potentially universal or can be near-universal. He identified these as being “simple” or “primary” metaphors and/or complex metaphors based on universal human experiences (p. 64). He then explores embedded manifestations of generic level metaphors in order to prove that they are not candidates for near universal metaphors. Besides variations in conceptual metaphors at specific level there are others, such as when a culture uses a set of different source domains for a particular target domain, or when a culture uses a particular source domain for the conceptualization of a set of different target domains (p.67). Our research framework further draws on Coseriu’s view on language as a means of conveying knowledge and thoughts, being closely related to society, civilization, thinking, community, politics, etc. A linguistic community would mould and influence the future evolution of a language by accepting, rejecting or adjusting innovation occurring in language (Coseriu, 1999). Furthermore, we also resort to Rodica Zafiu’s research on Romanian journalese (2001), in which she identified metaphors grouped into cognitive categories, such as the metaphor of the road or zoomorphic metaphors. According to Coseriu (1999, 2000, 2001), a special relation is often established among words, attesting to their metaphoric and expressive-figurative load as well as to their associative character and collocability. Such relationships can occur either constantly or sporadically. In journalese, this association of words often does not take into account the notional compatibility of terms and certain combinatory restrictions; the result often lies in the humorous or comical effect upon the reader (Zafiu, 2001). Journalese generally follows the same language patterns and evolution, and so do the metaphors in journalese: at first they display an individual character, of uniqueness, then they are shared and widely accepted by the community of journalists and readers, and finally they turn into language patterns used by the community (Coseriu,1999, 2000, 2001). This phenomenon has a two-fold purpose: to turn creative language into conventional language due to frequent occurrence and constant usage and to coin new metaphors or expressive associations that will create a certain impression or effect upon the reader. 3 . R esearch m ethodology Our methodology is guided on the one hand by the corpus-based approach, and one the other one by the studies in conceptual categories and universal metaphors. The advantage of a corpus-based approach is that it equally pertains to descriptive and theoretical studies of language, which enable investigations in almost any area of linguistics. In our case, the corpora amassed by the students facilitate the analysis of complex association patterns and help us characterize different registers of a language: general English vs business English. A primary focus of this experiment was making students aware of the difference between general English and business English, as well as describing a linguistic structure and its correspondent in a foreign language. Not only did the students identify and interpret conceptual and cognitive categories, but they also compared general English vs business English from a semantic and lexical point of view.
1082
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
The methods we resorted to in our paper include: 1. corpus creation and analysis (approx. 10,000 words for the Romanian corpus and approx. 10,000 words for the English one, each corpus containing 30 articles); 2. hand-coded conceptual clustering and mapping using interrelations between cognitive metaphors and cultural categories; 3. the creation of lexical, semantic and stylistic exercises for the development of business language mental lexicon of learners and users. The experiment heavily relies on concordancing tools and corpora, tools resorted to in the teaching of a foreign language: “It is suggested that, with concordancing, the teacher`s role is to guide and coordinate students’ activity as they research the language in a kind of data-driven, inductive, consciousness-raising exploration of texts. Using a concordancer, the learner can locate or be confronted with all the tokens of a particular type which occur in a text or corpus, observe how the token of words or phrases function in context, and note the most frequent senses, and the company the types typically keep as part of collocations or grammatical patterns“ (Kennedy, 1989, p.293). The purpose of this experiment is twofold: on the one hand, to increase students` awareness of business English lexicon and universal metaphors, and on the other hand, to better equip business English teachers to become to tackle the issue of teaching business English collocations. 4. R esults and interpretation 4.1. Case study 1 In the case of Student 1, the manner of approaching the subject is lexical and grammar oriented, the student focuses more on the quantitative analysis (the number of occurrences of the words in the list), the students also analyses the treatment of the pre/post modifiers, the type of contexts the key words occur, the contextual positive and negative implications of the key words. The lexical analysis is a surface one lacking the comparative approach, the only comparisons are related with cases of non-equivalence in translation and in these cases the student comes with solutions. The student associates words in context with images (e.g. unemployment is associated with roughness, violence; crisis is a trap), without explicitly associating the words with universal metaphors to be used both in English and Romanian contexts. 4.2. Case study 2 Although Student 2 had to deal with the same key words, this time the approach is different, closer to the requests of the assignment, in some cases the same universal metaphors are identified both for English and Romanian contexts: Table 1. Student 2 Money Universal Metaphor Money is liquid
English “All that is needed to keep the money flow is an investment banker with brainwave”. “Cheap money seems to keep the whole edifice afloat”.
Romanian “Banii vor fi injectati” “ a injecta bani la nesfarsit in sitemul financiar”
In other cases, the universal metaphors identified in English differ from the ones identified in Romanian Table 2. Student 2 Economy English Economy is a vehicle: “China has slammed the brakes on its economy”.
Romanian Economy is a container: “Trebuie sa medieze intrarea in economie a acelor 20 mld. Euro fonduri”
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
1083
Student 2 is good at identifying universal metaphors, she conducts a more comprehensive analysis, and reveals interesting and colourful metaphors: e. g. Inflation is a (slippery) object; Economy is a living organ with a feeble health. Student 2 also analyses and identifies the pre/post modifiers. 4.3. Case study 3 The third student’s approach is limited to the identification of keywords in contexts and it lacks specialized explanations and comparisons. It contains the student`s personal comments on the use of certain words and a quantitative analysis. 4.4. Case study 4 Student 4 provides both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis, her findings reveal the fact that Romanian metaphors are more explicit and they are inspired from a rather limited number of domains as opposed to English metaphors which present more variety. Student 4 compares her findings in English and Romanian newspapers and she comes to the conclusion that English words are characterised by an immediate capacity to collocate, which lacks Romanian words. The fourth student’s examples outnumber the ones identified by other students, they are not only accurate, but they also bring relevance to the aim of the assignment. 4.5. Case study 5 Student 5 identifies conceptual categories and examples in both languages without providing explanations, she adds few personal comments to the examples identified. The treatment of pre/post-modifiers is not analysed. Some key words from the list are not provided in their original contexts, the student picks up the collocations these words occur in. 4.6. Case study 6 Student 6 has a more descriptive essay with her own comments to the findings. The approach is lexical and grammatical without identifying and comparing the universal metaphors in the two languages. Student 4 presents the methodology which guided her research and examples identified in the articles which were subject to her analysis. Students` findings reveal the fact that business metaphors identified in English newspapers outnumber the ones in Romanian press, this could be accounted for by the length of newspaper articles and by the creativity of British journalists.
4. Conclusions Our tenet is that cognitive metaphors are instantiations of cultural categories manifested in the language spoken by the community that shares a common set of characteristics within a given cultural matrix. Our findings confirmed the theory that there is an undeniable relationship between language and culture. Thus, metaphors clustered in cognitive categories account for cultural categories, both in terms of conceptual universals and variants, resulting in a complex mapping of interrelated cross-connections. The experiment proved to be valuable for the authors as it better equipped the latter with new skills in the methodological approach of teaching Business collocations and conceptual metaphors. A series of lexical exercises emerged as a result of conducting this experiment. The exercises we designed proved useful in students` acquisition of both language and cultural insights. The explicit teaching of business metaphors in both source language and target language is instrumental in students` development of their mental lexicon, as well as (inter-)cultural and communicative competence. Appropriate teaching methodologies need to be designed in order to implement this element into the business language courses.
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Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
R eferences Charteris- Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Coseriu, E. (1999). Introducere in lingvistica. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Echinox. Coseriu, E. (1999-2000-2001). Creatia metaforica in limbaj. Revista de lingvistica si stiinta literara, 184-198, 8-26. Geeraerts, D., & Cuyckens, H. (2007). The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibbs, R.W. (2008). The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goatly, A. (2005). The language of metaphors. New York: Taylor & Francis. Herteg, C. (2008). Temporal metaphors and the expressiveness of verbs in fictional units. Annales Universitatis Apulensis, Series Philologica, 9(2), 179-188. Herteg, C. (2011). Transgressing English language boundaries: the case of business English borrowings. In T. Popescu, R. Pioariu, & C. Herteg (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary approaches to the English language. Theory and practice (pp. 39-52). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. an der Geer, J., Hanraads, J. A. J., & Lupton R. A. (2000). The art of writing a scientific article. Journal of Scientific Communications, 163, 5159. Kennedy, G. (1998). Introduction to corpus linguistics. Great Britain: London. Kovecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture. Universality & variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnsen, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. London: The University of Chicago Press. Mair, Ch., & Hundt, M. (2001). (Eds.). Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McCarthy, M. (2006). Explorations in corpus linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McEnery, T., & Wilson, A. (2004). Corpus linguistics.Cambridge: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, Ch. (2004). English corpus linguisitics. An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murhpy, P. F. (2001). Studs, tools, and the family jewels: metahors men Live by. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Musolff, A. & Zinken, J. (2009). Metaphor & discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelson, M. (2000). A corpus-based study of business English and business English teaching materials (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Manchaster, United Kingdom. Pemberton, J. A. (2001). Global metaphors. Modernity and the quest for one world. London: Pluto Press. Popescu, T. (2007). Teaching Business Collocations. In: D. Galova, ed, Languages for Specific Purposes: Searching for Common Solutions (pp. 163-176). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Popescu, T. (2008). Immigration discourses: the case of Romanian immigrants in Italy. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education, 1, 3144. Popescu, T., & Toma, M., (2009). Dictionary of business collocations: With Romanian translation and practice section. Alba Iulia: Aeternitas. Popescu, T., & Herţeg, C., (2010). Business English tests. Alba Iulia: Aeternitas. Popescu, T. (2011). Developing students`mental lexicon in English. In T. Popescu, R. Pioariu, & C. Herteg (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary approaches to the English language. Theory and practice (pp. 19-38). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stern, J. (2000). Metaphor in context. Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Thomas, J., & Short, N. (1996). (Eds.). Using corpora for language research. London: Longman. Zafiu, R. (2001). Diversitate stilistica in romana actuala. Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti.
ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
3rd World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Educational Leadership (WCLTA-2012)
Developing business students` linguistic and intercultural competence through the understanding of business metaphors Crina Herteg *, Teodora Popescu 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, 11-13 Nicolae Iorga Street, Alba Iulia, 510009, Romania
Abstract Business students are not fully aware of the intrinsic relation between language and culture, applied to business language genre. Business English language as a genre in itself has been widely analyzed and debated in specialist literature, as extensive research has been carried out in the field of teaching English for Specific Purposes, specialists having centered on finding the best methods to teach students how to use the business language correctly and appropriately, with clear focus on the notionalfunctional aspect. However, less research has been done in the intrinsic nature of business English. The aim of this study is to prove that cognitive metaphors are instantiations of cultural categories manifested in the language spoken by the community that shares a common set of characteristics within a given cultural matrix. Our theory will be applied to contemporary business journalese in English and Romanian and we will try to identify universal metaphors and metaphor variations assignable to cultural characteristics of contemporary Romanian and British business reality reflected in the written press. © Authors.byPublished Elsevier Ltd. and peer review under the responsibility of Prof. Dr. Ferhan Odabaşı © 2013 2012The Published Elsevierby Ltd. Selection Selection and peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Ferhan Odabaşı Keywords: cognitive metaphors; culture; business English;
1. Introduction The present paper is the result of an experiment which was conducted at 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia with MA students in language and communication in business administration. The students subject to the experiment had to incorporate two parallel bilingual corpora (one in Romanian and one in English) with the aim of facilitating contrastive analysis. The students were provided with a list of key words (crisis, investor, money, investment, salary/wage, EU funds, economy, debt, politicians, business, job, pension, work, inflation and their Romanian equivalents) and they had to operate the selection of newspaper articles from Romanian and British business press. Students had to conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses, identify cognitive metaphors, and find similarities and differences between the English and Romanian conceptual categories. The project was scheduled during the second semester and lasted 14 weeks. The selection of students was made according to their level of knowledge in comparative linguistics. Each student had different manners of approaching the analysis, out of all students involved in the experiment six case studies will be presented in our paper. The tool used by the students, ConcApp, helped them identify words and their contextual preferences.
* Crina Herteg Tel.: +40-0744572775 E-mail address: [email protected].
1877-0428 © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Ferhan Odabaşı doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.09.334
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
1081
2 . L iterature review In her studies, Popescu (2007, 2011) reinforces the difference between business English and general English: “Business English seems to be much more complex than any other area of ESP, especially considering the need for an interface with the general public” (p.20). In her research, Popescu resorts to authentic sources and tackles the problem from a methodological point of view, providing business English teachers with valuable tools in teaching the subject. This experiment comes as a continuation as well as a reinforcement of the Popescu’s above-mentioned theory. The qualitative analysis allowed us to provide descriptive information about the results that cannot be presented strictly quantitatively. Another point for our endeavours is the seminal work Metaphors we live by, published in 1980 by Lakoff and Johnson, whose theory of conceptual metaphor has opened endless vistas for subsequent research and debate. The basic assumption of this theory is that metaphor is not only a stylistic feature of language, but thought itself is metaphorical in nature. Thus, the conceptual structure of metaphors rests on correspondences or mappings between conceptual domains. These mappings function in a natural way, as some of them are already existent in the human mind emerging from background cultural knowledge, as different kinds of similarities between concepts. Further on, Kövecses (2005) argues that the cognitive view of metaphor can simultaneously account for both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought. He has proved that certain conceptual metaphors (for anger, time, event structure, and the self) are potentially universal or can be near-universal. He identified these as being “simple” or “primary” metaphors and/or complex metaphors based on universal human experiences (p. 64). He then explores embedded manifestations of generic level metaphors in order to prove that they are not candidates for near universal metaphors. Besides variations in conceptual metaphors at specific level there are others, such as when a culture uses a set of different source domains for a particular target domain, or when a culture uses a particular source domain for the conceptualization of a set of different target domains (p.67). Our research framework further draws on Coseriu’s view on language as a means of conveying knowledge and thoughts, being closely related to society, civilization, thinking, community, politics, etc. A linguistic community would mould and influence the future evolution of a language by accepting, rejecting or adjusting innovation occurring in language (Coseriu, 1999). Furthermore, we also resort to Rodica Zafiu’s research on Romanian journalese (2001), in which she identified metaphors grouped into cognitive categories, such as the metaphor of the road or zoomorphic metaphors. According to Coseriu (1999, 2000, 2001), a special relation is often established among words, attesting to their metaphoric and expressive-figurative load as well as to their associative character and collocability. Such relationships can occur either constantly or sporadically. In journalese, this association of words often does not take into account the notional compatibility of terms and certain combinatory restrictions; the result often lies in the humorous or comical effect upon the reader (Zafiu, 2001). Journalese generally follows the same language patterns and evolution, and so do the metaphors in journalese: at first they display an individual character, of uniqueness, then they are shared and widely accepted by the community of journalists and readers, and finally they turn into language patterns used by the community (Coseriu,1999, 2000, 2001). This phenomenon has a two-fold purpose: to turn creative language into conventional language due to frequent occurrence and constant usage and to coin new metaphors or expressive associations that will create a certain impression or effect upon the reader. 3 . R esearch m ethodology Our methodology is guided on the one hand by the corpus-based approach, and one the other one by the studies in conceptual categories and universal metaphors. The advantage of a corpus-based approach is that it equally pertains to descriptive and theoretical studies of language, which enable investigations in almost any area of linguistics. In our case, the corpora amassed by the students facilitate the analysis of complex association patterns and help us characterize different registers of a language: general English vs business English. A primary focus of this experiment was making students aware of the difference between general English and business English, as well as describing a linguistic structure and its correspondent in a foreign language. Not only did the students identify and interpret conceptual and cognitive categories, but they also compared general English vs business English from a semantic and lexical point of view.
1082
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
The methods we resorted to in our paper include: 1. corpus creation and analysis (approx. 10,000 words for the Romanian corpus and approx. 10,000 words for the English one, each corpus containing 30 articles); 2. hand-coded conceptual clustering and mapping using interrelations between cognitive metaphors and cultural categories; 3. the creation of lexical, semantic and stylistic exercises for the development of business language mental lexicon of learners and users. The experiment heavily relies on concordancing tools and corpora, tools resorted to in the teaching of a foreign language: “It is suggested that, with concordancing, the teacher`s role is to guide and coordinate students’ activity as they research the language in a kind of data-driven, inductive, consciousness-raising exploration of texts. Using a concordancer, the learner can locate or be confronted with all the tokens of a particular type which occur in a text or corpus, observe how the token of words or phrases function in context, and note the most frequent senses, and the company the types typically keep as part of collocations or grammatical patterns“ (Kennedy, 1989, p.293). The purpose of this experiment is twofold: on the one hand, to increase students` awareness of business English lexicon and universal metaphors, and on the other hand, to better equip business English teachers to become to tackle the issue of teaching business English collocations. 4. R esults and interpretation 4.1. Case study 1 In the case of Student 1, the manner of approaching the subject is lexical and grammar oriented, the student focuses more on the quantitative analysis (the number of occurrences of the words in the list), the students also analyses the treatment of the pre/post modifiers, the type of contexts the key words occur, the contextual positive and negative implications of the key words. The lexical analysis is a surface one lacking the comparative approach, the only comparisons are related with cases of non-equivalence in translation and in these cases the student comes with solutions. The student associates words in context with images (e.g. unemployment is associated with roughness, violence; crisis is a trap), without explicitly associating the words with universal metaphors to be used both in English and Romanian contexts. 4.2. Case study 2 Although Student 2 had to deal with the same key words, this time the approach is different, closer to the requests of the assignment, in some cases the same universal metaphors are identified both for English and Romanian contexts: Table 1. Student 2 Money Universal Metaphor Money is liquid
English “All that is needed to keep the money flow is an investment banker with brainwave”. “Cheap money seems to keep the whole edifice afloat”.
Romanian “Banii vor fi injectati” “ a injecta bani la nesfarsit in sitemul financiar”
In other cases, the universal metaphors identified in English differ from the ones identified in Romanian Table 2. Student 2 Economy English Economy is a vehicle: “China has slammed the brakes on its economy”.
Romanian Economy is a container: “Trebuie sa medieze intrarea in economie a acelor 20 mld. Euro fonduri”
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
1083
Student 2 is good at identifying universal metaphors, she conducts a more comprehensive analysis, and reveals interesting and colourful metaphors: e. g. Inflation is a (slippery) object; Economy is a living organ with a feeble health. Student 2 also analyses and identifies the pre/post modifiers. 4.3. Case study 3 The third student’s approach is limited to the identification of keywords in contexts and it lacks specialized explanations and comparisons. It contains the student`s personal comments on the use of certain words and a quantitative analysis. 4.4. Case study 4 Student 4 provides both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis, her findings reveal the fact that Romanian metaphors are more explicit and they are inspired from a rather limited number of domains as opposed to English metaphors which present more variety. Student 4 compares her findings in English and Romanian newspapers and she comes to the conclusion that English words are characterised by an immediate capacity to collocate, which lacks Romanian words. The fourth student’s examples outnumber the ones identified by other students, they are not only accurate, but they also bring relevance to the aim of the assignment. 4.5. Case study 5 Student 5 identifies conceptual categories and examples in both languages without providing explanations, she adds few personal comments to the examples identified. The treatment of pre/post-modifiers is not analysed. Some key words from the list are not provided in their original contexts, the student picks up the collocations these words occur in. 4.6. Case study 6 Student 6 has a more descriptive essay with her own comments to the findings. The approach is lexical and grammatical without identifying and comparing the universal metaphors in the two languages. Student 4 presents the methodology which guided her research and examples identified in the articles which were subject to her analysis. Students` findings reveal the fact that business metaphors identified in English newspapers outnumber the ones in Romanian press, this could be accounted for by the length of newspaper articles and by the creativity of British journalists.
4. Conclusions Our tenet is that cognitive metaphors are instantiations of cultural categories manifested in the language spoken by the community that shares a common set of characteristics within a given cultural matrix. Our findings confirmed the theory that there is an undeniable relationship between language and culture. Thus, metaphors clustered in cognitive categories account for cultural categories, both in terms of conceptual universals and variants, resulting in a complex mapping of interrelated cross-connections. The experiment proved to be valuable for the authors as it better equipped the latter with new skills in the methodological approach of teaching Business collocations and conceptual metaphors. A series of lexical exercises emerged as a result of conducting this experiment. The exercises we designed proved useful in students` acquisition of both language and cultural insights. The explicit teaching of business metaphors in both source language and target language is instrumental in students` development of their mental lexicon, as well as (inter-)cultural and communicative competence. Appropriate teaching methodologies need to be designed in order to implement this element into the business language courses.
1084
Crina Herteg and Teodora Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 93 (2013) 1080 – 1084
R eferences Charteris- Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Coseriu, E. (1999). Introducere in lingvistica. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Echinox. Coseriu, E. (1999-2000-2001). Creatia metaforica in limbaj. Revista de lingvistica si stiinta literara, 184-198, 8-26. Geeraerts, D., & Cuyckens, H. (2007). The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibbs, R.W. (2008). The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goatly, A. (2005). The language of metaphors. New York: Taylor & Francis. Herteg, C. (2008). Temporal metaphors and the expressiveness of verbs in fictional units. Annales Universitatis Apulensis, Series Philologica, 9(2), 179-188. Herteg, C. (2011). Transgressing English language boundaries: the case of business English borrowings. In T. Popescu, R. Pioariu, & C. Herteg (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary approaches to the English language. Theory and practice (pp. 39-52). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. an der Geer, J., Hanraads, J. A. J., & Lupton R. A. (2000). The art of writing a scientific article. Journal of Scientific Communications, 163, 5159. Kennedy, G. (1998). Introduction to corpus linguistics. Great Britain: London. Kovecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture. Universality & variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnsen, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. London: The University of Chicago Press. Mair, Ch., & Hundt, M. (2001). (Eds.). Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McCarthy, M. (2006). Explorations in corpus linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McEnery, T., & Wilson, A. (2004). Corpus linguistics.Cambridge: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, Ch. (2004). English corpus linguisitics. An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murhpy, P. F. (2001). Studs, tools, and the family jewels: metahors men Live by. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Musolff, A. & Zinken, J. (2009). Metaphor & discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelson, M. (2000). A corpus-based study of business English and business English teaching materials (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Manchaster, United Kingdom. Pemberton, J. A. (2001). Global metaphors. Modernity and the quest for one world. London: Pluto Press. Popescu, T. (2007). Teaching Business Collocations. In: D. Galova, ed, Languages for Specific Purposes: Searching for Common Solutions (pp. 163-176). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Popescu, T. (2008). Immigration discourses: the case of Romanian immigrants in Italy. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education, 1, 3144. Popescu, T., & Toma, M., (2009). Dictionary of business collocations: With Romanian translation and practice section. Alba Iulia: Aeternitas. Popescu, T., & Herţeg, C., (2010). Business English tests. Alba Iulia: Aeternitas. Popescu, T. (2011). Developing students`mental lexicon in English. In T. Popescu, R. Pioariu, & C. Herteg (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary approaches to the English language. Theory and practice (pp. 19-38). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stern, J. (2000). Metaphor in context. Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Thomas, J., & Short, N. (1996). (Eds.). Using corpora for language research. London: Longman. Zafiu, R. (2001). Diversitate stilistica in romana actuala. Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti.