Metaphorical codes in structuring national economic discourse

ABSTRACT

Within the framework of Lakoff and Johnson cognitive theory (2003. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), we explore the use of metaphor in the English and Russian economic discourses as the means to create a metaphorical field, comprising culture-specific and universally shared cognitive blends. We apply the cognitive and comparative analyses to metaphor, which shapes the Economy concept as a cultural code in a corpus of economic texts from English and Russian press. The approach helps to reveal the associative links between source and target domains within metaphorical mappings. Thus, metaphors ECONOMY IS A ROAD, ECONOMY IS AN ANIMAL, ECONOMY IS A DISEASE, ECONOMY IS FOOD, and ECONOMY IS A MECHANISM are common for both languages. For the English language, unique, culturally determined metaphors are ECONOMY IS FIRE and ECONOMY IS STORM, whereas for the Russian language, they are ECONOMY IS THE BOTTOM and ECONOMY IS CLIMATE. Therefore, metaphorical codes in a given language account for risks, opportunities and uncertainties of systematically different economies through multicultural discourse interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspaper discourse
• cognitive theory
• metaphor
• cultural code
• comparative study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daria E. Ertner (Candidate of Philology) is Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology and Translation Studies at the Institute of Social Studies and Humanities, University of Tyumen, Russia. She specializes in text linguistics, stylistics, and translation studies with emphasis on culturally determined language codes. Her research interests concern the theory of metaphor with a focus on the cognitive theory of conceptual mappings. For more than ten years, she has been working within cognitive linguistics approach and metaphor theory applying them to both literary and non-literary types of discourse.

Olga B. Ulyanova (Candidate of Philology) is Associate Professor of the Department of the English Language at the Institute of Social Studies and Humanities, University of Tyumen, Russia. She specializes in historical and comparative linguistics. Her research interests concern semantics, pragmatics, the relation of language and society with a particular focus on multicultural and cross-cultural interaction. Her current studies focus on classroom-based research within the ESL and CLIL approaches.

ORCID

Daria E. Ertner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6600-4237