Analysing English metaphors of the economic crisis

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.