Metaphor in Economics and Specialised Discourse

Overview of this book

This book on metaphor in specialised discourses is divided into four Sections. The first one deals with metaphor in the discourse of business and economics, which is one of the most fertile areas of development and application of metaphoric terminology (see Charteris-Black & Ennis 2001, Bielenia-Grajewska 2009: 142–143, Dilai & Serafin, 2019). Wang et al. (2013: 260) have pointed out, together with many other scholars, that the language of economics is highly metaphorical: “Metaphor helps the writer to formulate new knowledge and then to communicate it to the reader in a form convenient for perception, as abstract reasoning can often be performed more easily by using the main mechanism of a metaphor.”

In the opening chapter, José Mateo and Francisco Yus address humorous financial metaphors from a pragmatic perspective based on Sperber and Wilson’s relevance-theoretic approach. The authors consider that this theory can explain these types of metaphors in a satisfactory way, especially because, according to the proposal of ad hoc concept adjustment, the concept communicated with a word is normally different from the literal coded one (i.e., regardless of context), which is also typically the case of the metaphors analysed in their contribution. Chapter 2, by Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Antonio Moreno-Sandoval, addresses the metaphorical expressions within the field of health and war in a corpus of Spanish Letters to Shareholders. They focus their study on corpus-based methodologies which identify metaphors and classify them according to tagging computer programmes such as the Metaphor Identification Approach. Their findings are analysed following Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis. This study pivots on two areas: a corpus-based methodology used to process metaphorical expressions corpus and an analysis on two frequent key domains: war/army and health/fitness. Business English students’ use of metaphors is the topic of the third chapter by Andreea Rosca. She analyses and classifies the different patterns of metaphorical combinations used by business English students using Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera-Masegosa’s approach with interesting findings. Finally, chapter 4, by José Joaquín Martínez Egido, deals with a very specific discourse where financial metaphors abound: blogs. His hypothesis sustains that the more technical a financial and business blog the less metaphors are used. To corroborate this, he selects and analyses a corpus of 60 economic texts.

In the case of politics and law, we find interesting overlaps between these two areas in the chapters included in this Section. For instance, Maria Angeles Orts Llopis approaches legal metaphors in the political environment of the English Supreme Court in chapter 5. She examines different official texts in order to describe the patterns used in the conceptualization of constitutional crisis used by this British Institution, free of the emotional technolects and metaphorical clichés common in newspaper articles.

The second chapter in this Section, by Miguel Angel Campos Pardillos, may also be placed in an intersection between politics and the law. This time the object of analysis is the academic discourse pro-EU and anti-EU policies. This chapter examines the metaphorical imagery used in the academic discourse on the legitimacy of the European Union and its policies in order to support or oppose to them.

Finally, chapter 7 by Catalina Iliescu Gheorghiu is about the language of diplomacy and the interpreter’s metaphoric and imagological dilemmas, also with certain intersections with politics and the law. She addresses the metaphoric dimension of diplomatic discourse and discusses the idea that interpreting itself is a metonymic activity.

The last Section includes analyses of metaphor in other specialised discourses not ascribable to the previous Sections but nevertheless interesting in the way these metaphors shape the vocabulary of their respective communities and specialities. Chapter 8 focuses on metaphors in marine engineering journals. The author, Silvia Molina Plaza, investigates the metaphors used in maritime research articles from a linguistic, conceptual and communication level in order to ponder their role and relevance in maritime discourse.

The next chapter is very specific in scope: Metaphorisation in fashion designers’ TED Talks. Isabel Balteiro remarks in this chapter that her approach is innovative as it has not been addressed before. She attempts a selection, analysis, description and classification of the fashion metaphors available in the fashion industry including those intended to persuade and attract consumers in a highly competitive and ambitious world.

Chapter 10, by Carmen Marimón Llorca, is also very specific in scope, this time addressing metalinguistic metaphors in the informative press. According to this author, although conventional metaphors are present in all kinds of texts, they have hardly deserved proper attention from specialists. To help cope with this lack, the author analyses the use of metaphors in egalitarian speech focussing on their recurrence and discursive use.

The book ends with a chapter by Carmen Sánchez Manzanares and María Isabel Santamaría Pérez, focusing on neologisms and terminology in health sciences, specifically regarding Assisted Reproduction. The authors, after compiling a corpus of specialized texts covering twenty-seven years (1992–2019), analyse the creation and evolution of this specific terminology and examine its results from the perspective of the cognitive theory of metaphor.