Languages for special purposes abound in figurative usage. As special-purpose texts are read by experts and laymen alike, highly specialised and abstract concepts can be presented in terms of conceptual metaphors that are grounded in more tangible and familiar concepts. The present thesis analyses conceptual metaphors in articles about the Greek government-debt crisis published in The Economist. The thesis aims to determine the most common source domains that appear in conceptual mappings and explain the reasons for their frequent occurrence in economic-financial discourse.
The thesis first discusses Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which provides a foundation for the analysis. The identification of conceptual metaphors in the corpus is carried out according to the Metaphor Identification Procedure. Following the systematic steps of the said procedure, I was able to establish the target and source domains of each lexical unit and determine their conceptual mappings. As expected, the concept HUMAN BEING, along with QUANTITY and QUALITY image-schemas, the SUBSTANCE CONTAINER and SIZE OF A PHYSICAL OBJECT groups of metaphors are the most frequently occurring source domains. The first is grounded in the most familiar source domain there is (ourselves) while the last four are based on our experiences within the world of three-dimensional space. Since the articles analysed are about the economic crisis, the conceptual metaphors grounded in the concept HUMAN BEING convey the negative effects of the crisis. The submappings generate a group of HEALTH metaphors that cover all the salient points of the crisis and represent the most frequently used source domain.
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