Email this article Analysing English metaphors of the economic crisis
Abstract
Abstract - The present article reports the findings of an investigation into the metaphorical expressions adopted by English-language magazines to describe the latest economic/financial crisis. The corpus used for the investigation was about 100,000 words large, with texts taken from The Economist and from The International Economy. All the articles selected from these two magazines were published between Fall 2008 and Winter 2012. The main aim of the inquiry was to offer a more detailed and comprehensive classification of economic-crisis-metaphors than those proposed in previous research. In this respect, a total number of forty different types of such metaphors was identified. Alongside the theoretical classification, a quantitative analysis of the data was also carried out in order to find out which kinds of metaphorical expression are used most frequently. Results suggest that the economic/financial crisis is predominantly conceptualized in terms of something negative about a human being, about an object, and about a motion. In particular, viewing a state of economic/financial crisis as a damaged or destroyed object appears to be the most widely adopted metaphor. Results also suggest that different economics magazines can vary significantly in the amount of metaphorical language used.
Keywords: metaphor, economic crisis, semantics, pragmatics, journalistic styles.
Sommario – Questo articolo riporta i risultati di una ricerca sulle metafore adottate da riviste in lingua inglese per descrivere la recente crisi economica e finanziaria. Il corpus utilizzato per l’indagine è stato di circa 100.000 parole, con testi reperiti dal The Economist e dal The International Economy. Tutti gli articoli selezionati da queste due riviste sono stati pubblicati tra l’autunno 2008 e l’inverno 2012. Lo scopo principale dell’indagine è stato quello di fornire una classificazione delle metafore della crisi economica più dettagliata ed esauriente di quelle proposte in ricerche precedenti. In questo senso sono stati individuati complessivamente quaranta differenti generi di metafora. Parallelamente a questa classificazione teorica è stata anche condotta un’analisi quantitativa dei dati nell’intento di individuare i tipi di espressione metaforica usati più frequentemente. I risultati suggeriscono che la crisi economica finanziaria è prevalentemente pensata come qualcosa di negativo riguardante un essere umano, un oggetto e un movimento. In particolare, la metafora più ricorrente sembra essere quella in cui lo stato di crisi economica viene riportato come un oggetto danneggiato o distrutto. I risultati indicano anche che riviste economiche differenti possono variare sensibilmente nella quantità di linguaggio metaforico utilizzato.
Parole chiave: metafora; crisi economica; semantica; pragmatica; stili giornalistici.
References
Boroditsky L. 2000, Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors, in “Cognition” 75 [1], pp. 1-28.
Brown T.L. 2003, Making Truth: Metaphor in Science, University of Illinois Press, Urbana (Ill.).
Canter D. 1988, How do we know that it works? Therapeutic outcome as negotiation, in “Complementary Medical Research” 2 [3], pp. 98-106.
Casasanto D. and Boroditsky L. 2008, Time in the Mind: Using space to think about time, in “Cognition” 106, pp. 579-593.
Charteris-Black J. 2000, Metaphor and Vocabulary Teaching in ESP Economics, in “English for Specific Purposes” 19, pp. 149-165.
Charteris-Black J. 2004, Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke.
Cook G. 2001, The Discourse of Advertising, Routledge, London.
Croft W. and Cruse D.A. 2004, Cognitive Linguistics, Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Deane P.D. 1992, Grammar in Mind and Brain. Explorations in Cognitive Syntax, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.
Goatly A. 1997, The Language of Metaphor, Routledge, London and New York.
Henderson W. 1982, Metaphors in Economics, in “Economics” 18 [4], pp. 147-153.
Hodge R. and Kress G. 1993. Language as Ideology (2nd edn.), Routledge, London.
International-economy 2013, Retrieved from www.international-economy.com/AboutTIE.htm (7.2.2013).
Johnson M. 1987, The Body in the Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Keller E.F. 1995, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-century Biology, Columbia University Press, New York.
Koller V. 2004, Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse, Palgrave MacMillan, New York.
Kövecses Z. 2002, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York.
Lakoff G. 1993, The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In Ortony A. (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (2nd edn.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 202-251.
Lakoff G. and Johnson M. 1980a, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lakoff G. and Johnson M. 1980b, Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language, in “The Journal of Philosophy” 77 [8], pp. 453-486.
Lakoff G. and Turner M. 1989, More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Leech G.N. 1969, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, Longman, London.
López A.M. and Llopis M.A. 2010, Metaphor Pattern Analysis in Financial Texts: Framing in Positive or Negative Metaphorical Terms, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 42 [12], pp. 3300-3313.
McCloskey D.N. 1983, The Rhetoric of Economics, in “Journal of Economic Literature” XXI, pp. 481-517.
Merry S. 2000, Letter, in “The Economist”, 24 June, p. 4.
Mio J.S. 1997, Metaphor and Politics, in “Metaphor and Symbol” 12 [2], pp. 113-133.
Moon R. 1998, Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Myers G. 1994, Words in Ads, Arnold, London.
Newmark P. 1980, The Translation of Metaphor, in “Babel” 26 [2], pp. 93-100.
Nowottny W. 1962, The Language Poets Use, Athlone Press, London.
Petrie H.G. and Oshlag R.S. 1993, Metaphor and Learning, in Ortony A. (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (2nd edn.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 579-609.
Reisfield G.M. 2004, Use of Metaphor in the Discourse of Cancer, in “Journal of Clinical Ontology” 22 [19], pp. 4024-4027.
Sadock J.M. 1979, Figurative speech and Linguistics, in Ortony A. (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (1st edn.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 46-64.
Santibáñez F. 2002, The object image-schema and other dependent schemas, in “Atlantis” 24, pp. 183-201.
Searle J. 1979, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Semino E. 2008, Metaphor in Discourse, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Urbonaite J. and Seskauskiene I. 2007, Health metaphor in Political and Economic Discourse: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis, in “Studies about Languages” [11], pp. 68-73.
White M. 1997, The Use of Metaphor in Reporting Financial Market Transactions, in “Cuadernos de Filología Inglesa” 6 [2], pp. 233-245.
Wikipedia 2013. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist (7.2.2013).
Full Text: pdf
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
