Developing Business Students’ Linguistic and Intercultural Competence through the Understanding of Business Metaphors

AbstractBusiness 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 notional- functional 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