Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: Metaphor plays an important role in business field. This paper will study the application of structural metaphor in business English from the cognitive perspective, which will serve us a better approach towards English learning. Characteristics of universality and diversity of metaphor show the importance of its function in the business field, and comprehension of structural metaphor will be beneficial for business activities, and it is also helpful for economy development and in turn enable us to understand its application in other directions.

Key words: structural metaphor; business English; application

摘要：隐喻对整个商务领域的影响十分巨大。本文试从认知角度研究结构隐喻在商务英语中的应用，可以帮助我们更好的学习英语。隐喻普遍性、多元化的特征表明了隐喻在商务领域里的重要性。对结构隐喻的理解既为商务活动带来更多的便利，又促进经济的发展，同时有助于我们理解隐喻在其它方向的应用。

关键词：结构隐喻;商务英语;应用

1. Introduction
Metaphor has been studied for quite a long time, but it is restricted at being studied as a kind of rhetoric device. The traditional metaphor studies were initiated by Aristotle. Since 1970s, people started the research of metaphor in many ways and from multiple-perspectives. Metaphor gradually became object of study in many fields such as linguistics, philosophy, pragmatics, semantics, psychology, literature, cognitive science, psychological analysis, linguistic psychology, translation, semiotics, foreign language teaching. Abundant studies show that people are becoming more and more aware of the importance of metaphor in human cognition and social activities. As an important part of human language, metaphor is applied in people’s daily life. It also plays an important role in business field. Our thinking is metaphorical, and the vast majority of metaphor is based on the thesis of the conceptual metaphors. This paper aims to study the application of structural metaphor in business English from the cognitive perspective.
2. Explanation of Conceptual Metaphor
Greek etymology of metaphor includes two parts: “meta”-which means “to go beyond” and “pherain”means“to send”. Thus the meaning of the word is to “send”the characters of the first object to the second. In this way, the second object will get a new meaning that “goes beyond” the original meaning.