Economic crisis related metaphors: ECONOMIC CRISIS IS NATURAL DISASTER

Abstract

According to Inpe – Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, disasters are calamitous events that cause great negative impact on society and are essentially distinguished by their origins, that is, by the nature of the phenomenon which triggers them. Earthquakes, deluges, storms, tsunamis, floods, among others, are examples of common natural phenomena that can cause natural disasters. The aim of this paper is to present the analyses of some metaphor occurrence in the economic-financial discourse related to the global economic crisis which originated from these natural disaster denominations. This crisis, which had its major disclosure in 2007, has caused the (re)appearance of many new metaphorical Lexical Items to denominate the actions, institutions, processes, etc., which affected the financial system of several countries, causing negative effects on the economy of these nations. Lexical Items such as storm, deluge, flood and tsunami, for example, have assumed terminological characteristics and started to denominate in a more concrete way the concepts related to the crisis. Under the light of Conceptual Metaphor and Frame Semantics theories we analyze in this paper some metaphorical Lexical Items used in the press discourse to refer to the crisis, published in Folha de S. Paulo newspaper from August 2007 to December 2013.

Keywords

• Conceptual Metaphor
• Economic crisis
• Portuguese language
• Natural disasters