AWEJ Volume.4 Number.4, 2013 Pp.128-142
The PHYSICAL HEALTH/ILLNESS Metaphor in the Financial Times
Maria Nader
School of Languages, University of Salford,
United Kingdoms
Abstract
This paper is dedicated to show how metaphors are employed to conceptualise economy in terms of physical health and/or illness in economic newspaper articles collected from the Financial Times. The way conceptual and linguistic metaphors are mapped from the source domain of physical health/illness onto the target domain of economy is discussed. One major question this paper is trying to answer is: How are the conceptual and linguistic metaphors used in the economic discourse, and what connotation they imply to portray the economic scene in general and to highlight certain economic events or phenomena such as ‘inflation’ or ‘deflation’ in particular? For this purpose, the conceptual theory of metaphor (CTM) will be applied. In addition, a rationalization of the meaning of specific examples and of the function of metaphor in those examples is involved in the examination process. This paper is based on an extended study that identified twenty three conceptual source domains in a number of economic newspaper articles compiled from the Financial Times, mainly the columns ‘opinion’ and ‘comment’ between the years 2007 and early 2011.
Keywords: Health/Illness Metaphor, Economic Discourse, Conceptual theory of metaphor (CTM), Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP)