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Metaphorical framing of ‘free economy’: The liberalization of economy in Hong Kong (1997-2017)
Author(s)
Date Issued
2019
Conference
Citation
Zeng, H., & Ahrens, K. (2019 Aug 29). Metaphorical framing of ‘free economy’: The liberalization of economy in Hong Kong (1997-2017). Metaphor Festival 2019, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Hong Kong has been ranked as the world's freest economy with limited government intervention for the past 25 consecutive years (Heritage Foundation, 2019). In this study, we investigate whether and how metaphorical frames of this ‘free economy’ concept in Hong Kong public discourse have changed over a twenty-year period (1997-2017), starting from the moment at which Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China. Our corpus includes 1,248 public speeches containing 1,793,611 words by Hong Kong principal officials (01/07/1997-31/12/2017). Using Metaphor Pattern Analysis (Stefanowitsch, 2006), we searched lexical items in the target domain of FREE ECONOMY to obtain concordances. Associated metaphors were identified following MIPVU (Steen, et. al., 2010) and further categorized into source domains following Author (in progress). We focus on two types of changes in metaphorical framing: changes of source domains and changes of source-target domain mapping principles (Author, in press; Author, 2010). The preliminary analysis on 10% of the data reveals that the concept of ‘free economy’ was positively constructed over the whole period while the framing functions differed at critical junctures. For example, before 29 June 2003, when the first Free Trade Agreement was signed between Hong Kong and China, metaphors were primarily used to encourage the idea of ?constructing a free economy’ (e.g. building and promoting free trade). After 2003, metaphors were mainly used to highlight the achievements of free economy and stating the hope of ‘achieving a full
economy liberalization’ (e.g. emphasizing free trade as a pillar that supports Hong Kong economy and breaking down [of] barriers for free trade development). This study highlights the role of source-target mapping principles in corpus-based metaphorical framing analysis. It also demonstrates the potential of Chinese political influence in Hong Kong politicians' language use for framing specific societal issues during the first twenty-years of the post-handover period.
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