Research Article
Forward-mover Versus Nation-builder: Metaphorical Framing of Corporate Self-representation in Top Executive Letters from US Bay Area and China's Greater Bay Area Companies
Dongman Cai*
Issue:
Volume 14, Issue 4, August 2026
Pages:
149-159
Received:
16 June 2026
Accepted:
2 July 2026
Published:
3 July 2026
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.11
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Abstract: This study investigates how nominal metaphors frame corporate self-representation in top executive letters of sustainability reports from US Bay Area and China's Greater Bay Area Fortune Global 500 companies between 2018 and 2023. Drawing on 85 letters (80,516 tokens) in the Chinese corpus and 117 letters (69,524 tokens) in the US corpus, quantitative analysis identifies thirteen vehicle groupings that differ significantly across the two corpora — with physical power and movement the most strongly overused in the US corpus, and fight/war and building the most strongly overused in the Chinese corpus — while qualitative analysis further reveals self-representational differences beneath the quantitative similarity of mechanism and theatre. The US corpus jointly uses physical power and movement to frame firms as the IMPACT-MAKING FORWARD MOVER, while the Chinese corpus jointly uses fight/war and building to frame firms as the STRATEGIC NATION-BUILDER. mechanism and theatre with similar frequency suggest both similarities and differences in vehicle-topic mappings and self-representation patterns. The findings suggest that metaphorical framing is sensitive to the analytical level at which they are examined, and that examining cross-cultural CEO discourse at the vehicle-topic level complements the conceptual-domain-level analysis predominant in prior research. The study contributes to cross-cultural metaphor research by providing empirical insight into how a preferred corporate self is framed for US versus Chinese stakeholder audiences. It also guides practitioners in using metaphor with sensitivity to the cultural-institutional contexts shaping meaning in cross-cultural sustainability communication.
Abstract: This study investigates how nominal metaphors frame corporate self-representation in top executive letters of sustainability reports from US Bay Area and China's Greater Bay Area Fortune Global 500 companies between 2018 and 2023. Drawing on 85 letters (80,516 tokens) in the Chinese corpus and 117 letters (69,524 tokens) in the US corpus, quantitat...
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Research Article
The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese:
A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang
Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen*
Issue:
Volume 14, Issue 4, August 2026
Pages:
160-173
Received:
18 June 2026
Accepted:
1 July 2026
Published:
24 July 2026
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
Downloads:
Views:
Abstract: This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces how each language encodes it and distributes it across situation types. Every token is coded for situation type (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classes for Japanese) and realized aspectual meaning, and the results are arrayed in situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrices. The data span several registers: Vietnamese literary prose, Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts, bilingual journalism, parallel fairy tales, and the complete parallel text of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The central finding is an aspectual asymmetry. -teiru is polysemous, its value fixed by the situation type of its host verb (progressive, permanent-state, resultative, progressive⇄resultative-ambiguous); đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker that never reaches the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones but diverge sharply at the resultative boundary, where Vietnamese recruits đã and.rồi. On a single parallel text the resultative cell holds 30.7% of -teiru tokens but only 1.0% of đang tokens (χ2 = 205.6, df = 1, p <.001). The asymmetry follows jointly from typology - agglutinating Japanese concentrates aspectual meanings in one inflected form, isolating Vietnamese distributes them across function words - and from the semantics of đang, which resists the fixed state that defines the resultative.
Abstract: This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces...
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