Publications

Publication details [#950]

Tomoni, Bianca. 2012. Conceptual metaphors in financial discourse: The 'Romanian way' of thinking, speaking and writing finances. 18 pp. URL
Publication type
Book – conference proceedings
Publication language
English

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that metaphor is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday language. Similarly, financial-banking discourse, which is the focus of attention in this article, has been proven to be largely metaphorical. Tomoni, who departs from a corpus of 74 documents issued by the National Bank of Romania and by three Romanian commercial banks before and during the recent financial crisis, sets out to identify and analyse the type of metaphors that occur in this specific kind of discourse. In so doing, this paper combines socio-cognitivist approaches and Blending Theory. After providing readers with a cursory theoretical overview and an explanation of the methodology and corpus employed, the author divides metaphors into two broad groups, namely: (i) the ‘war’ metaphor and (ii) the ‘watery’ and ‘machine’ metaphors. In turn, each of these groups comprises several more specific metaphors such as the following: BANKS’ BRANCHES ARE MILITARY UNITS, FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS ARE MILITARY OPERATIONS, FINANCIAL GOALS ARE MILITARY OBJECTIVES, FINANCIAL SYSTEMS ARE MECHANISMS, etc. To complement this analysis, the author also seeks to investigate the persuasive role of some of the metaphors under scrutiny.