Publications

Publication details [#14358]

Harutyunyan, L. 2019. Basic Models of Conceptual Metaphors in Business Media Discourse (Based on Money Related Metaphors) . Science and Education a New Dimension. Humanities and Social Sciences VII(36) (214) : 18–21. 4 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Society for Cultural and Scientific Progress in Central and Eastern Europe
ISBN
23081996

Abstract

It is widely accepted that metaphor is closely related to the actions that are performed in our mental system and that human beings interpret the world metaphorically. Traditionally, metaphor has been considered a figure of speech that adds some connotations to the denotation and description of objects. Nevertheless, the cognitive approach to metaphor (such as the theories developed by Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner) regards this device as a complex conceptual mechanism rather than a linguistic phenomenon, which entails difficult processes in terms of mental representation, imagery and inferential structure between conceptual domains, systematic projection of language, and so on. In fact, cognitive linguists sustain that understanding of the world is permitted through metaphor and argue that our ordinary conceptualizations are metaphorical in nature. In their opinion, people resort to the concept of causation to organize their reality, which helps the world to function efficiently. Consequently, as metaphors are used to get to know different phenomena and processes in the world more precisely, the mechanism of conceptual metaphor has become central in the identification of cognitive processes taking place in the human mind. The objective of the current work is to examine metaphorical concepts connected with money and its equivalents, such as electronic money, currency, cryptocurrency, stocks and shares, and prices, by means of metaphorical linguistic expressions retrieved from a corpus consisting of online business newspapers (www.bloomberg.com, www.businessinsider.com, www.ft.com, www.economist.com, www.reuters.com, www.bbc.com, www.cnn.com, www.theguardian.com, www.cnbc.com). The texts included were chosen because they reported recent news and trends in the fields of economy, business and finance. In addition, business media discourse is a source of phenomena that are conveyed through metaphoric concepts. In some cases, these phenomena are considered abstract, thus, people make use of distinct conceptual domains (source domain) so as to understand them (target domain). Instances retrieved from the business news in our corpus contain a wide range of money related concepts that are expressed through metaphors. It demonstrates that the latter are an effective way of conceptualizing economic events, since abstract concepts are perceived through more concrete concepts. This analysis also shows that some basic models of money-related conceptual metaphors are more common in this discourse, and we provide a classification of these models. Some examples are movement (which, in its turn, can be dynamic or stationary), liquid and living organism which are used as source domains to understand complex phenomena of the financial sphere.