Article published in:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 8:2 (2018) ► pp. 267–285

Denominal verbs with metaphorical meanings in British business media discourse

A corpus analysis of articles in the “Financial Times”

| National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm
| Perm State National Research University

This study is a corpus-based examination of denominal verbs with figurative meanings in the British business broadsheet The “Financial Times”. Based on the study of word-formation as the source of metaphoricity (Brdar & Brdar-Szabó, 2013; Janda, 2011, 2014; Steen et al., 2010) and propositional analysis (Pankrats, 1992; Steen, 2002), it presents the classification of such verbs, and discusses how and why denominal verbs with metaphorical meanings were used in the journalistic discourse about business. The empirical base of this study was a 621,000 word corpus of articles from The “Financial Times” from the years 2014–2015. The authors conclude that the frequency of denominal verbs is due to the conceptual and evaluative functions of metaphor. There is consideration of the implications of these findings for linguists, translators, ESP students and those interested in corpus research into metaphor.

Keywords: denominal verb, corpus analysis, morphological metaphor, word formation, business media discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
  • Data sources
Published online: 23 October 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.17023.smi
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Data sources

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CALD)
Available at http://​dictionary​.cambridge​.org​/dictionary​/learner​-english/
Online Etymology Dictionary
Available at http://​www​.etymonline​.com/
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD)
Available at https://​en​.oxforddictionaries​.com/
The British English 2006 corpus
Available at https://​cqpweb​.lancs​.ac​.uk​/be2006​/index​.php
The “Financial Times” randomly chosen articles from
2014–2015Google Scholar