Metaphors of the economy in the Dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese Collocations: A corpus-based multidimensional analysis

Abstract

This article presents the results from a corpus-based multidimensional analysis of the language of the Brazilian economy, building on a previous study that determined the major dimensions underlying the statistical collocations of the +8,000 most frequent words in Brazilian Portuguese (Berber Sardinha et al., submitted). The corpus used was the Corpus Brasileiro (Brazilian Corpus) (LAEL, CEPRIL, PUCSP, Fapesp, CNPq), a multi-register corpus with 1 billion tokens. Dimensions of collocation are the communicative parameters that underlie collocational choice, and the method for identifying them is based on the Multidimensional Analysis framework developed by Biber (1988). This study focused on dimension 6, which reflects the language used to talk about the economy in Brazilian Portuguese; this dimension was broken down into five other (sub-) dimensions, which further specify the nuances of the language of the economy. These five (sub-)dimensions were then analyzed for metaphor by hand, and the analysis revealed that metaphors account for almost 30% of the collocations. Furthermore, metaphors are not distributed evenly across the (sub-)dimensions of the language of the economy. This study is part of a larger project whose ultimate goal is to produce a corpus-based dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese collocations.

Keywords

• Corpus Linguistics
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Collocations
• Economy
• Metaphor
• Multidimensional analysis