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Abstract
The paper aims to highlight that metaphors have proved essential and relevant to the description, explanation and understanding of the economic and financial crisis that the world has experienced over the last years. In order to achieve this, we have carried out a study to identify and analyse the conceptual metaphors used to explain and describe the economic and financial crisis in English. Our study is based on the corpus approaches to metaphor analysis. Therefore, we have worked on a corpus of English economic and financial articles, which were selected from those published, between 2009 and 2012, in the English journal The Economist. During this period, many of the world's countries officially acknowledged the financial crisis. Obviously, this meant taking drastic measures that have severely affected the population. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data obtained within this study is meant to show how this economic and financial phenomenon and its effects are conceptualized in business press articles.
Keywords: economic and financial crisis; conceptual metaphors; corpus analysis
1. Theoretical approaches - from the comparative perspective to the cognitive approach to metaphor
Metaphors have been studied from a number of different perspectives by a wide variety of disciplines including linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, psychology and education among others. This has led to the emergence of different and sometimes controversial ideas and theories that have attempted to define, describe and analyse metaphors.
From the multitude of approaches to the study of metaphor, two questions have arisen focusing on whether metaphors should be considered linguistic phenomena related to how we express things or cognitive phenomena related to how we understand them (Cameron & Low, 1999).
Ortony (1979: 3) underlines that "any serious study of metaphor is almost obliged to start with the works of Aristotle". Therefore, we aim to begin our research on metaphors describing the economic and financial by highlighting some of the most important ideas developed within the traditional approach as initially described by Aristotle.
According to scholars in ancient times, metaphors belonged exclusively to the domain of rhetoric. Thus, they analysed them alongside other tropes as imaginative, poetic and ornamental devices. Explanations of what metaphors are can be traced back to Aristotle. In his well-known works Poetics and Rhetoric, most studies focus...