The Economist and The Financial Times. A study of movement metaphors

This paper features the analysis of metaphors describing market movements in a corpus of web retrieved articles taken from the electronic archive of the periodical The Economist and the newspaper The Financial Times. The reason for choosing these two sources comes from the need to create a semitechnical corpus about the language of economics meant for a more specialised readership. All the articles have been published between July 2001 and June 2002, that is six months before and six months after the introduction of the single currency. The reasons for opting for this span of time are that it is the period of maximum interest in the historical event of the currency changeover, and that it could grant us the opportunity to examine market movements in texts focusing on an equivalent subject matter. As for the analytic framework chosen for the linguistic investigation, we have based it on the cognitive theories of metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) which see them as linguistic expressions and mental representations; in particular, we have based our analysis following the theories of previous researchers who applied cognitive theories to the study of the language of economics (Charteris-Black 2000, Charteris-Black and Ennis 2001, Henderson 1994). The aim of this study is to illustrate the use of equivalent categories of metaphors of movement in the two papers. Through the comparison of the hits it is also possible to reveal some significant differences in the frequency of particular instances even within the same domain. For example, a preliminary quantitative analysis of The Financial Times has shown twice as many hits as The Economist from the domain MARKET MOVEMENTS ARE NAUTICAL OR WAYS OF MOVING IN THE WATER. The examination of participants and circumstances involved in movement metaphors made it possible to enquire into the nature of the economy and the market. That is, we have differentiated between economy and market moving as autonomous entities and as entities whose movements depend on human intervention. The various electronic searches on the corpus will develop results which might give an insight into the way the newspaper and the magazine build their discourse strategies.