Variation and variability of economics metaphors in an English-Italian corpus of reports, newspaper and magazine articles

Relevant contributions to the contemporary study of metaphor have come from cognitive linguistics, psychology, rhetoric and philosophy. Scientists have also helped to throw light on the functions of metaphors and metaphor-like processes either in science in general (e.g. Kuhn 1979) or in their own discipline (e.g. McCloskey 1988, 1995; Henderson 1982 for economics). Cognitive approaches such as Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) assume that basic metaphors are universal and not language-specific as they originate from central cognitive processes and structures of human thought. However, less central metaphors may be more specific and even universal ones can be somewhat culturally filtered. Cross-linguistic research to investigate the possibility that metaphors are not language-specific has shown that at least some of them are shared. Yet, cases were detected were no complete consistency could be found. In particular, studies of metaphors in economics texts in English, French and Dutch have shown differences that were ascribed to cultural factors. Drawing on various strands of research, this paper aims to study metaphor in economics in two languages (English and Italian) and in two text types – economic reports and magazine or newspaper articles – and contrast the use of metaphorical processes in articles originally written in Italian and articles translated from English into Italian. The aim of the former investigation is to detect variation in the use of metaphors as a function of the purposes which different text types may serve. The hypothesis to be tested here is that reports as sources of economic information tend to use standard economics metaphors drawn from physics, health and medicine, change, war and weather, while magazine/newspaper articles as popular economics texts exhibit greater variability in metaphors. The latter investigation has the objective to identify variation in terms of alternative metaphors, their construction and/or different frequencies in use in original as opposed to translated Italian articles. This part of the study is to a certain extent cross-linguistic since it takes into account that differences in use may derive from an influence of the source language – in this case English – on the target texts. Much of corpus-driven research on metaphor is Anglo-centric and relies on the existence of affect thesauri which were compiled a few decades ago. There are promising developments in the area of modern European languages, especially German and French, where digital dictionaries of metaphors are being developed; the long-running EuroWordnet (EWN) Project is starting to create metaphor databases together with national initiatives in Germany, particularly the work carried out under the rubric of Hamburg Database project is relevant here. The use of WordNet’s template imposes its own limitations as far as metaphorical language is concerned. Over the last five or so years the Hamburg team has collated and annotated over 1500 examples of the use of non-literal language in form of a corpus of texts in German and French. We explore possible answers to our research questions by using Harvard University’s General Inquirer (GI) lexicon (Stone et al. 1966) and the words or (here: economic) terms it categorises as "Pos" and "Neg" as connoted semantic orientations in a specialist domain that can serve as probes for non-literal language. These words/terms were translated into Italian by a mixture of human and machine translation. The culture and cross-linguistic research questions are also investigated by using phraseological units extracted from an Italian dictionary of culture-bound metaphors.