An Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in
Jack Ma’s English Public Speech
马丽郭鸿雁
（宁夏大学，宁夏 银川 750021）
【摘要】马云是中国一名成功的企业家。他被世界经济论坛评选为“年轻的全球领袖”，被中央电视台评选为“年度十大商业领袖”。马云在国内外做过多场成功而富有影响的演讲。本文将从概念隐喻的角度对马云在国外的三篇英文演讲进行分析。
教育期刊网 http://www.jyqkw.com
关键词 马云；公众演讲；修辞；概念隐喻
【Abstract】Jack Ma is Ma Yun’s English name who is a successful entrepreneur in china. He was selected by the World Economic Forum as a “Young Global Leader” and chosen by CCTV as one of the “Top 10 Business Leaders of the Year”. Jack Ma has made many successful and influential public speeches at home and abroad. This paper will make an analysis of Jack Ma’s English speech from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor.
【Key words】Jack Ma; Public speech; Rhetorical devices; Conceptual metaphor
0Introduction
Jack Ma is Ma Yun’s English name who is a successful entrepreneur in china. He is the chairman, lead founder and chief executive officer of the Alibaba Networking Technology Company. After graduating from Hangzhou Normal School and winning the foreign language degree in 1988, Jack Ma worked as a lecturer in English and International Trade at the Hangzhou University of Electronic science and Technology from 1988 to 1995. Then in 1995, he founded China Page. In 1999, he founded Alibaba group which rapidly became the biggest Business to Business electronic commerce platform in whole world. In 2001, Jack Ma was selected by the World Economic Forum as a “Young Global Leader” and chosen by CCTV as one of the “Top 10 Business Leaders of the Year”. Jack Ma has made many successful and influential public speeches at home and abroad.
This paper will make an analysis of Jack Ma’s English speeches at Stanford University, Columbia Business School and 2009 APEC from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor.
1Metaphor
Traditionally, metaphor was viewed as linguistic phenomenon used for poetic and rhetorical purpose. Plato thought metaphor is a kind of ornamental and flowering language used to express emotion but unfit in political argumentation and scientific dissertation. Aristotle said, “Metaphor is the application to something of a name belonging to something else, either from the genus to the species, or form the species to the genus, or form a species to another species, or according to analogy” (1994) . According to Black (1962) , “a metaphorical expression is used in place of some equivalent literal expression.” For example, in “He is a lion,” lion here is used to replace the literal expression of a brave or courageous man. So metaphor has been considered a kind of comparison or a condensed simile. It is a matter of words rather than thought or action.
With the rise of cognitive linguistics, the status of metaphor has changed drastically. According to cognitive linguistics, natural language, as a product of the human kind, is one domain of human cognition. The organizing principles in language are the same with those operating in other cognitive domains, with which language is intimately linked. As Fesmire (1994) puts it, cognitive linguistics “grapples with how human beings actually make sense of their world” and “dwells in the stream of human experience rather than in a supposedly pure realm of form.”
It is acknowledged that the publication of Metaphors We Live By (1980) marks the beginning of the cognitive view on metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphor is not peripheral, but instead essential to human thinking and reasoning. Metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, but more fundamentally a conceptual process that structures our world. The human conceptual system, which in involved the processing, understanding and making use of metaphor, is itself metaphorically structures. Thus, metaphor, found to be pervasive in our everyday life, exists in language and most importantly, in thought and action. In other words, metaphor plays a basic role in defining the way we perceive the world, the way we think and react to that perceived world. This cognitive understanding of metaphor generates the term of Conceptual Metaphor which, according to Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live by (1980), can be defined as “understanding and experiencing on kind of thing in terms of another.”
Lakoff explain metaphor as “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system’, which is central to the cognitive view of metaphor. A conceptual metaphor consists of two conceptual domains, namely the source domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions, and the target domain governs the metaphorical process, i.e. conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract as target, and a more concrete or physical one as their source but not the other way around. Metaphors reflect the cognitive process in which we understand the target domain by exploiting cognitive models from an analogically related source domain.
A metaphorical mapping is a set of correspondences that exist between the source domain and the target domain, which project the structure of the former onto the latter. This enables us to understand unknown or abstract concepts by conceiving them in terms of familiar or concrete objects, or experiences we are familiar with. For examples:
（1）Life is a journey.
（2）Study is a journey.
（3）Marriage is a journey.
（4）Love is a journey.
All the above metaphors are based on our general knowledge and conventionally held belief about journey, life, study, marriage and love which share the same schema:
Starting point-process-goal
It is a mapping form the source domain to the target domain. The result of the mapping is to establish a series of corresponding ontological epistemic relationship. Some metaphors tend to be basic and fundamental to all human beings, and they do not change from one place to another. For example, orientational and ontological metaphors tend to be universal, for they are based on common experiences that derive from human bodily interaction with the environment. And the metaphors realized also then to be universal. Six types of metaphors can be found in Jack Ma’s three English speeches.
1.1Company-as-Person Metaphors
Conceptual metaphors derived from human body belong to ontological metaphor. This is because people tend to take some abstract, vague, shapeless conceptions as concrete, tangible entities, such as human body. The mapping of a company’s establishment, development and bankruptcy onto a person’s infancy, maturity and death is a typical evidence of ontological metaphor, which allows us to perceive a company in terms of human beings. We can find such expressions in Jack Ma’s speeches as:
1）I have 8 babies. In the past 15 years, I built up 8 companies, seven of them, very healthy; one of them, I sold it.
2）But today, they (the big companies) all died.
No matter what kind of cultural background people are from, they must pass through the same life cycle. The common experiences result in similarities in mapping the life cycle of a person into the development state of a company. Meanwhile, the audience could vividly feel Jack Ma’s love and care for his 8 companies just as parents’ love and care for their babies, which is shared by all people in the world.
1.2Business-as-Animal Metaphors
Measures taken by human beings to control of animals are metaphorically used to refer to the control of business, which also belongs to ontological metaphor. During the fights between human beings and animals, there will be a lot of unexpected dangers and difficulties which force human beings to devote their courage, determination and hard work. This can mapped onto the business activities. Engaging in business was so complicated and abstract that Jack Ma metaphorically compared his experience in business field to fight with animals in order to make the audience vividly understood how difficult his experiences are, for example:
1）We’re like a blind man riding on the back of blind tigers.
2）I said that if eBay is the sea of sharks, then we are in the Yangtze alligator. Let’s not fight the sea, we are in the Yangtze River and thought.
The metaphor in example 2 has deeply Chinese culture style, but it could also be experienced by all the audiences.
1.3Money-as-Water Metaphors
The money is going to big companies, the money goes to infrastructure, the money goes back to the stock market.
This metaphor is based on the meaning of bank. Bank means both “land sloping up along each side of a river or canal” and “establishment for keeping money, valuables, etc safely”. It can contain both money and water. Money is static, while water is dynamic. So Jack Ma conceptualized the process of money to the process of water.
1.4Competition-as-War Metaphors
During the bloody war, people fought with each other by arms. Some people were killed in the war and some people were injured in the war. Competition in modern society mainly focuses on technology. Even though it is invisible, it is still cruel and brutal, for example:
I see the bloody competition.
As a business leader, Jack Ma is so experienced that he conceptualized business as battlefield and competition as war to remind the audience of the risk of business. This metaphor is acknowledged by all the people.
However, “conceptual metaphors need not all be universal”. Culture plays an organizing role in human thought, and culturally determined beliefs are the main influence on “how we behave in and relate to our environment”. Therefore, conceptual metaphors are culturally related, for they are grounded in physical experience, which “takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions”
Some metaphors may vary from culture to culture and different communities may have different metaphors to conceive of the same abstract concepts. The way speakers select particular metaphors corresponds satisfyingly with their cultural understanding, which can be proved by the following examples.
1.5Business-as-Game Metaphors
Different business modes can be mapped onto different games, for examples:
And we believe that USA is very good at playing basketball. We should focus on playing Ping-Pong, because we should not always play the same.
Basketball needs a big playground, needs a lot of people and needs enough money so it just likes the business mode, B2B, which only focuses on big companies. Pingpong needs a small playground and less people and money, so it just likes the business mode, SMEs, which focuses on small and medium-sized companies. It is well-known that America is good at playing basketball and Chins is good at playing Pingpong. Jack Ma thought it was the same as in the business filed. He used this vivid metaphor to explain what his business mode so clearly that the audience could grasp the main idea immediately. We could also feel Jack Ma’s deep mind and soul as a Chinese entrepreneur.
1.6Person-as-Places Metaphors
Business competition is bloody, but Jack Ma thought competitors are the best laboratory, for example:
And the other things I what to share with you is that competitors are the best laboratory for you.
In the laboratory, we experiment to test and verify our thoughts. Technology is developing so rapidly that we have not got enough time to experiment totally by ourselves and we should learn from others, so Jack Ma compared competitors as the best laboratory.
It is obvious that the metaphors in Jack Ma’s speeches are living. On one hand, these living metaphors corresponded with the topic about the new business mode. On the other hand, these living metaphors corresponded precisely to the personality of Jack Ma as a “Young Global Leader”.
2Conclusion
This paper makes a detailed analysis of Jack Ma’s English speeches to explore the usage of Conceptual Metaphor in public speech. By using these Metaphors, Jack Ma expresses both his language skills and his wisdom as a business leader.
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