Metaphorical pattern analysis in financial texts: Framing the crisis in positive or negative metaphorical terms

This paper aims to show that metaphors are a powerful tool to frame economic issues and serve certain political interests. To this purpose, we have carried out a comparative study of the conceptual metaphors of the Global Systemic Crisis in both English and Spanish. The financial crisis has indeed caused havoc in the economic panorama worldwide. Spain has been no exception, but, unlike other European countries, financial problems were initially belittled by the Spanish mass media for several months, until the subsequent outbreak of the crisis in relatively recent times.Following the current trend of corpus approaches to metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004; Deignan, 2006; Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2006), our study is based on a corpus of English and Spanish financial articles selected from those published during 2007 and the end of 2008 in the English journal The Economist and the Spanish newspaper El Economista. The analysis of the metaphors used in these articles will allow us to show how the same economic reality may be differently conceptualized at different points in time on account of different socio-political factors, such as a Government which, on the verge of national elections, refused to reveal the grim state of affairs of the national economy.