Metaphor framing in Spanish economic discoursea corpus-based approach to metaphor analysis in the Global Systemic Crisis

Resumen

In recent years, metaphor and frame have been shown to be principle organizers of political discourse (Lakoff, 1996, 2004; Charteris-Black, 2008). From this point of view, the most important consideration in the study of political discourse is not how politicians react to the world, but rather how they 'frame' or conceptualize that world in their discourse. This paper aims to show that metaphors are also a powerful tool to frame economic issues and serve certain political interests. To this purpose, we are carrying out a study of the conceptual metaphors where the current Global Systemic crisis finds its expression in the Spanish language of economic affairs. A study of metaphor conceptualization in the field of the language of Economics cannot be carried out without taking into account local, socio-political factors that affect the economy of a linguistic community at a certain point. Indeed, the current financial crisis, having at its core the U.S. economic collapse, is causing havoc in the economic panorama worldwide. The American subprime crisis has severely affected American banks, but the repercussions of the credit crunch have reached every corner of the world. Spain, mirroring the globe, ails with financial institutions suffering from the toxic asset exposure coughed up by U.S. mortgage-backed securities. To add bad to worse, like a perfect storm, the Spanish economic scenario is also unveiling a phenomenal problem of political corruption, entwined with urban development, spreading like a disease. All of these phenomena, for some time, unheeded and belittled by the national mass media. Following the current trend of corpus approaches to metaphor analysis (Charteris- Black, 2004; Deignan, 2006; Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2006), our study has been based on a corpus of authentic Spanish financial articles. The articles have been compiled from those available in the newspaper El Economista, a national economic journal, during 2007 and the end of 2008. The analysis and comparison of the metaphors used in these articles will allow us to show how the same economic reality may be differently conceptualized at different points of time, on account of different socio-political factors, such as a Government that, on the verge of national elections, refuses to unveil to the electorate the grim state of affairs of the international economy and its national repercussions. In fencing the language of market movements and fluctuations in Spanish during a certain period of time, we will attempt to account for the different sensitiveness of the global community to a momentous phenomena such as the Global Systemic Crisis, as opposed to the way in which mass media, the political class and the think-tanks of a country like Spain, have reacted to it.