(Applications of Cognitive Linguistics, 19) Honesto Herrera Soler - Michael White-Metaphor and Mills - Figurative Language in Business and Economics-De Gruyter Mouton (2012) PDF

Metaphor and Mills
Applications of Cognitive Linguistics

19
Editors
Gitte Kristiansen
Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
Honorary editor
René Dirven
De Gruyter Mouton
Metaphor and Mills
Figurative Language in Business
and Economics
Edited by
Honesto Herrera-Soler
Michael White
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-027296-3
e-ISBN 978-3-11-027458-5
ISSN 1861-4078
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet
at http://dnb.dnb.de.
쑔 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago TeX-Production GmbH, Berlin
Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Table of contents
List of contributors vii
Metaphor and Mills: Figurative language in business and economics.

Introduction 1
Honesto Herrera-Soler and Michael White
Section I
Metaphor in economic theory and in economics as an academic
discipline
From barter to coin: Shifting cognitive frames in Classical Greek economy 27

Paloma Tejada Caller and Antonio Guzmán Guerra
Metaphor and economic thought: A historical perspective 49

Nicolaas T.O. Mouton
Towards a better understanding of metaphorical networks in the language

of economics: The importance of theory-constitutive metaphors 77
Catherine Resche
Metaphors of the Brazilian Economy from 1964 to 2010 103

Tony Berber Sardinha
Section II
Cultural filters in contrastive studies
Mandarin translation of English economic metaphors: A cross-linguistic

study of conceptually related economic terms 129
Siaw-Fong Chung
Translating metaphor in business/economics dictionary articles:

What the theory says and what lexicographers should do 155
Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Marisol Velasco-Sacristán
The use of verbal and gestural metaphor in explanations of management

theory 175
Jeannette Littlemore
vi Table of contents
“Bigger, a lot bigger, massively much bigger”: A comparative study

of hyperbole in business and economics lectures 201
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
Section III
Metaphor in the economy and business in practice
The perfect storm: An imperfect metaphor 225

Philip Eubanks
Framing a bank: Reputation management during financial crises 243

Lise-Lotte Holmgreen
Metaphor and knowledge specialization in business management:

The case of project management discourse 265
Hanna Skorczynska
Metaphor as an instrument of linguistic and social identity

co-construction in business development networks (BDNs) 291
Hana Blazkova
Subject index 321

Author index 325
List of contributors
Tony Berber Sardinha Philip Eubanks

PUCSP, Sao Paulo Catholic University Department of English
R. Monte Alegre 984, sala 17 CA Northern Illinois University
Sao Paulo, SP, 04302-020 DeKalb, IL 60115
Brazil USA
tony@pucsp.br eubanks1@niu.edu
Hana Blazkova Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera

Department of English English Department
The University of Birmingham Escuela Universitaria de Estudios
Edgbaston Empresariales
Birmingham Universidad de Valladolid
B15 2TT Paseo del Prado de la Magdalena, s/n
United Kingdom 47005 Valladolid
kosmato@yahoo.com Spain
pedro@emp.uva.es
Siaw-Fong Chung, Ph.D. http://www.pedrofuertes.net/
Department of English
National Chengchi University Antonio Guzmán Guerra
No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road Dpto. Filologı́a Griega
Taipei City 11605 Facultad Filologı́a
Taiwan Universidad Complutense Madrid
http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/∼sfchung/ bruselas@filol.ucm.es
國立政治大學英國語文學系專任副教授
Belinda Crawford Camiciotttoli Honesto Herrera-Soler

Department of English Studies Dpto. Filologı́a Inglesa
Università di Pisa Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y
Via S. Maria 67 Empresariales
56026 Pisa Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Italy Campus de Somosaguas
bcrawford@tin.it 28223 Madrid
Spain
hherrera@ccee.ucm.es
viii List of contributors
Lise-Lotte Holmgreen Hanna Skorczynska

Department of Culture and Global Departamento de Lingüı́stica Aplicada
Studies Facultad de Administración y
Faculty of the Humanities Dirección de Empresas
Aalborg University Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
9220 Aalborg East Camino de Vera s/n
Denmark 46022 Valencia
holmgreen@cgs.aau.dk Spain
hskorczy@idm.upv.es
Dr. Jeannette Littlemore
Centre for English Language Studies
Paloma Tejada
Westmere
English Department
School of English Drama American
Facultad de Filologı́a
and Canadian Studies
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
University of Birmingham
28040Madrid
Edgbaston
Spain
Birmingham B15 2TT
ptejadac@filol.ucm.es
United Kingdom
j.m.littlemore@bham.ac.uk
Marisol Velasco-Sacristán
Nico Mouton English Department
Department of Communication, Escuela Universitaria de Estudios
Business, and Information Empresariales
Technologies Universidad de Valladolid
Universitetsvej 1 Paseo del Prado de la Magdalena, s/n
Roskilde University 47005 Valladolid
DK-4000 Roskilde Spain
Denmark marisol@emp.uva.es
ntom@ruc.dk
Michael White
Catherine Resche Escuela Univ. De Estudios
Modern language Department Empresariales
Université Panthéon-Assas - Paris 2 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
92 rue d’Assas Av. De Filipinas 3
75270 Paris cedex 06 28003 Madrid
France Spain
catherineresche@club-internet.fr white@filol.ucm.es
Metaphor and Mills: Figurative language in business
and economics. Introduction
Honesto Herrera-Soler and Michael White
1. Introduction
Among the first discourse researchers to apply the impetus given to metaphor
studies by Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors we live by were those work-
ing on economics. Accordingly, the early publications by Henderson (1982) and
Jeffreys (1982) were soon followed by a wealth of work and evidence.1 This is
hardly surprising because long before the advent of the Conceptual Theory of
Metaphor (cmt)2 , economic theorists were themselves not only profusely using
metaphor, but were highly conscious of doing so and were even making it an
object of theoretical reflection – Alfred Marshall (1890/1920) is an outstanding
example in this respect. On the other hand, our very title, Metaphor and Mills,
is itself a homage to that same figurative process, recalling that, as the industrial
revolution spread along the waterways of Northern England, the manufacturing
enterprises set up were not known as factories but simply as ‘mills’, metonymi-
cally focusing on the powerhouse to refer to the factory as a whole. Additionally,
the salient role played by factories in the onward march of economic life licenses
us to forge a further link where the mill or factory metonymically stands for the
economy as a whole. Given such figurative ubiquity, a book of the present scope
and nature, attempting both to give an overview of the role of metaphor and fig-
urative language generally in the field, as well as to bring together wide-ranging
current research interests in concrete areas within what is now a vast discipline,
is indeed timely.
While Economics in its real world existence is perhaps as old as human
society itself, definitions of the subject as a discipline have proved no easy task.
1. Among others, see McCloskey 1985; Mason 1990; Lindstromberg 1991; Jäkel 1993;
Smith 1995; Boers 1999; Eubanks 2000; López Maestre 2000; White 2003; Koller
2004a; Charteris-Black 2004; Erreygers and Jacobs (Eds), 2005; Herrera 2008; White
and Herrera 2009; Fukuda 2009; Alejo 2010.
2. For significant updates, see Gibbs (Ed) 2008; Steen et al 2010; and, for a recent
critique, Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez Hernández 2011.
2 Honesto Herrera-Soler and Michael White
Samuelson and Nordhaus (1992:3) set out by taking five tentative shots at it
before settling for a sixth which runs as follows: “Economics is the study of how
societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute
them among different people”. Marshall (1890) gave a less technical and more
all-embracing definition as: “A study of mankind in the ordinary business of
life”.
The advantage of this latter is that it reminds one that economics is not just
what is taught behind the ivy-clad walls of renowned institutions but is the com-
mon quotidian activity of human society throughout the globe. This is the optic
pursued by Dasgupta (2007) in his Economics. A Very Short Introduction where
he tackles the subject by contrasting the life and livelihood of a child in a subur-
ban area of a prosperous US city with that of one in a rural African environment,
showing that in both cases, despite the startling contrasts, comparable economic
principles systematically apply.
We take the brief of Economics in its most inclusive sense, covering the
academic discipline and the slice of reality ‘out there in the world’ and the same
goes for Business, currently the leading academic discipline in the Universities
and Colleges of many countries in so far as undergraduate numbers are con-
cerned3 and ubiquitous ‘out there in the world’. To this we may add that the 20th
century saw a burgeoning of academic endeavours in the field and these were
characteristically pursued under the banner of specification. Hence, currently,
blanket terms like economics or business harbour within their domains a host
of countless specifications, each with a claim, indeed right, to the considera-
tion of a discipline in its own right. In all cases, language would have played a
crucial role in enabling such specialisations and in particular that indispensable
ingredient of language as we know it, namely metaphor. Concomitantly, the
production and consumption of publication on the overall subject of economics
has increased – and indeed is still increasing – exponentially. Economics dis-
course thus ranges from the highly specialised journal through academic books
and into journalism and broadcasting. Within the latter two, distinctions may
equally be drawn between the more specifically focused at one extreme to the
most highly disseminative at the other. In all, from existing research and merely
glancing at the present volume, the claim is that metaphor is widespread in all
of these discourses (Mata and Lemercier 2011).
3. Crawford Camiciottoli (2007:1) puts it as follows: [B]usiness education has moved to

the forefront of academics. In the UK, with approximately 13% of the total enrollment
at university in 2004–2005, business studies ranked at the top of all other academic
divisions”. Equally, she provides data for the US showing that Business Studies
degrees accounted for 22% of all Bachelor’s degrees and 25% of Master’s degrees in
the year 2003–2004.
Metaphor and Mills: Figurative language in business and economics. Introduction 3
While previous research and, undoubtedly, the present volume shows the
ubiquitous use of metaphor in economics discourses, a crucial question arises
at the very outset. Is the use of metaphor in economics driven by the goal of
getting a message across or is it fundamentally vehicular in constructing that
very discourse itself. In other words, is metaphor use in economics ancillary
to communication or is it systemic to economics discourse itself? The commu-
nicative function of metaphor in general has been either a tacit or an explicit
assumption for well over two millennia – the very fact of its longstanding recog-
nition as consubstantial with poetic discourse (Aristotle 1991; Blair 1783/1823)
is convincing evidence in this respect. By no means do we wish to minimise
or underestimate this function of metaphor in Economics discourse. Rather it
would be fair to say that judicious use of metaphoric expression has played a
major role in establishing and transmitting essential economic concepts down
through the ages – be they Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, Jevon’s ‘final degree
of utility’or even former UK Chancellor Norman Lamont’s ‘green shoots of eco-
nomic spring’. Furthermore, we easily recognise the communicative function of
metaphor in such economics discourse types as book and journal article titles,
the financial press or economics journal covers or headlines, in policy statements
or news reports or in the sphere of publicity (Knop 1985; Fuertes-Olivera, et al,
2001; Forceville 2002; White 2006; Martı́n de la Rosa 2009; White and Her-
rera 2009; Cortés del Rı́o 2010; Brône and Coulson 2010). A corollary of the
communicative role is the question of how metaphor is deployed, consciously or
more often than not unconsciously, in conveying ideology and this has proved
to be a very productive research field for metaphor scholars both in general and
in the specific area of business and economics.4 Hence, as well as taking this
communicative role of metaphor as an established and crucial fact in Economics
discourse, we particularly want to highlight the structural systemic role of the
more abstract superordinate level of conceptual metaphor and show how the
latter is a core factor in the very construction of Economics discourse itself.
Perhaps because of the very qualities of abstractness and because of operating
at the non-basic level, that role may be much more easily overlooked.
At this latter level, analysis immediately throws up two historical master-
structuring metaphors for Economics discourse, namely, the organic and the me-
chanical. The inexorable rise, even dominion, of mathematics in all sciences tips
the scales towards the mechanical (Mirowski 1991).Thus, such crucial economic
concepts as equilibrium, or all the concepts deriving from fluid and force dynam-
ics, from the calculable impulse and from motion are eloquent conveyors of eco-
4. Among others see Dirven et al. (eds.) 2001; White and Herrera 2003; Koller 2004a,
2004b; Musolff 2004; Goatly 2007).
nomic thinking. These are both communicative and theory building. Simply tak-
ing the, now museum piece, Philips Machine (see Resche, this volume) we find
that, for all its simplicity, it masterminded so much economic thinking and con-
ditions economic policy. Even prior to Philips’ invention, President Roosevelt
could consider his New Deal policies as ‘priming the pump’ and today’s ‘quan-
titative easing’ measures as a response to the current Economic crisis is charac-
teristically seen to operate by ‘injecting liquidity’ into the financial system.
Despite the fact that mathematics has become indispensable to economics
discourse, biology has nevertheless in no way lost its role as an over-arching
economics-discourse metaphor. Even Marshall who, as Professor of Political
Economy at Cambridge, was responsible for applying mathematics to Eco-
nomics, was a staunch defender of biology metaphors as even more significant
than mechanical ones (see Backhouse 2002: 178–182; Resche, this volume;
Mouton, this volume). For him, as was the case with Biological evolution, so
too Economics evolved as a continual process rather than by uneven leaps. An-
other impressive historic example of the role of Biology lies in the theoretical
innovations of Quesnay (1694–1774). These owed a great deal to the French-
man’s prior training in Medicine as a surgeon and physician. As Backhouse
2002: 100–101) puts it: ‘His medical background is important, as it influenced
his perspective on economics. In turning to economics, Quesnay sought to anal-
yse the pathology of society and to propose remedies. . . . he focused on the
circulation of money – a clear analogy with the circulation of blood within the
body, discovered over a century earlier’ (see also in this respect: Resche, this
volume; Mouton, this volume). Again, this is both theory constitutive as well as
being a communication booster. In our own days, if we could not talk about eco-
nomic activity in terms of growth or life cycle (White 2003), economic theory
would be deprived of one of its fundamental or constituent components. In fact,
it is not even surprising to see both the above dominant – and apparently mutu-
ally exclusive – metaphors dovetailing as in the remarkable phrase of Kaldor’s
“the flywheel of growth”5 .
As well as the mechanical and the organic, other aspects of our surrounding
world and universe equally provide productive theory constituent metaphors. If
economic events are seen in terms of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis,
hurricanes, storms), economic policy is accordingly theorised in keeping with
5. Quoted in Coates (1994: 17). On the other hand, when mentioning these two
metaphors, it is perhaps timely to recall a great analytic precursor in this connec-
tion, namely Pepper (1942) who characterised ‘mechanism’ and ‘organicism’ as ‘root
metaphors’. In the words of Hayes et al. (1998: 98): “A root metaphor is a common-
sense conceptualisation of a domain, in accordance with which categorical concepts
have been constructed.”
those analogies. Thus, the hypothetical measures contemplated by economic

policies may not suffice to prevent economic disasters, just as measures in the
real world cannot impede natural catastrophes. Nevertheless, due diligence in
anticipatory and preparatory measures can incisively operate in the sphere of
damage limitation and pre-empt much of the suffering triggered by such events.
In fact, in the wake of the current crisis, many of the recipes and measures
advanced by economists and policy makers are couched within such a framework
and research on the figurative language of the crisis is already appearing (Rojo
López and Orts Llopis 2010; Koller and Farrelly 2010).
As Resche points out in her chapter, metaphors, once established, have a life
of their own and can branch out to advance theory. Thus a term like ‘leverage’,
characteristically used in the sense of the empowerment which credit gives to
companies to advance, if not multiply, their business capacity, has a logical
grounding in the physical world. However, the term ‘deleverage’ which would
have little if any sense in its physical-world source domain has evolved into a
crucial economic concept of particularly wide currency at the present moment of
deep crisis, referring to the policies whereby companies, fearing over-exposure
to credit, rush to unwind debt by a variety of strategies from cost cutting measures
to the sale of non-core assets.
The present volume, therefore, sets out to examine these diverse roles of
figurative language in this vast field of Business and Economics discourse and
it does so from a suitably varied mix of perspectives. We shall now give an
individual overview of each section and of the respective contributions of these
sections separately.
2. Section I
2.1. Metaphor in economic theory and in economics as an academic

discipline
The four chapters of this section are an eloquent reflection on how figurative
language impregnates the different fields of knowledge related to economy and
economics and show how already known or new terms are continually both used
and modulated in response to new concepts and the passage of time (Cowling
2009, Frank 2009, Musolff 2009). This insight of how social change both trig-
gers and is reflected by language change is common to all four contributions.
The issue of semantic change in the usage of existing terms and the creation
of new terms in response to the needs of the different historical moments pro-
vides further support for the current importance attributed to the situatedness
of metaphor usage (Frank, Roslyn et al, eds., 2008). The Greek coinage chapter
focuses on the shift in the meaning of a few representative key words and on
how this process permeates changes not only in the social sphere but also in
the cognitive and cultural patterns of Classical Greek times. While the spread
of coinage kick starts economic dynamicity, metaphor and metonymy supply
Greek society with the language to characterize that dynamicity. Resche’s con-
cern with the theory constitutive metaphors spanning time and place gives a
broad overview of evolving metaphor usage in Economic theory and, likewise,
Mouton’s historical approach to biological metaphors in the field of the econ-
omy provide convincing diachronic evidence. Finally, the metaphor framework
capturing the economic plans developed in Brazil over the last half century tes-
tifies to the wealth of language resources and creativity deployed to capture and
get across meaning in any specific field, in this case predominantly the issue of
inflation. We shall now look at each of these chapters in detail.
In their contribution to the volume, Paloma Tejada and Antonio Guzman
examine a momentous historical event, namely the inception of general usage
coinage in classical Greece. They do so by a ‘diachronic revision of a selected
corpus of Greek words’, contrasting uses of 8th century bc Homeric times with
6th to 4th century bc developments when coinage spread. In the absence of coins,
the Homeric period is shown to have its own particular system and terminology
for transactions, indicating a value system dominated by frames such as ex-
change, myth and preciousness. Certain utensils and substances are exchanged,
value derives from the notion of preciousness, for example, the perceived beauty
of certain materials or their use for ornaments or their connection with myth
or the sacred. Terminology is markedly metonymic: tálanton ‘Zeus’s scales of
fate and justice’ extending to ‘anything weighed’ or drachmé ‘what is held in
the hand’. The advent of coinage triggers a veritable social revolution where
the linguistic changes both reflect and enable shifting cognitive and cultural
frames. The authors provide a formidable diachronic account of lexicographical
developments in connection with transactions, charting the rise of countability,
the polysemous extensions of existing words and showing that coinage, in the
sense of minting, is accompanied by word coinage to meet new needs – reflecting
changing reality. Moreover, the authors show how this linguistic evidence reveals
the veritable social revolution taking place on the back of the spread of coinage
and this has conceptual consequences as well as value shifts. Exchange as tied to
myth and the sacred severs. Nevertheless, certain overlaps perdure, some coins
being engraved with divinity images, for example. Metonymy and metaphor are
crucial to these developments. For instance, Drachmé evolves to mean ‘coin’,
‘silver coin’, nomisma, which is to have such terminological evolution in the fu-
ture centuries, is coined at this time to mean ‘coin’. Trápseda from ‘dining table’
evolves towards a meaning approaching ‘bank’ while tókos takes the spectacular
metaphorical leap from ‘childbirth’to capture the crucial (and for centuries hotly
debated) concept for the future of economics, namely that of ‘yield’, ‘profit’ or
‘creditor’s interest’, that is yield or interest on money itself. Overall, in this
chapter the reader will find the authors make a novel and well-documented con-
tribution to a largely overlooked area of the study of metaphor and economics.
The economic writings of Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) are particularly rel-
evant to metaphor studies not only because of his judicious use of the device
to establish economic theory but also and especially because Marshall overtly
reflected on the nature and aptness of metaphor for that purpose. Starting with
Marshall’s discussion on the need to give priority to biological metaphors over
those from physics, Nico Mouton puts forward an alternative perspective to
mainline Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). He strongly argues for the ne-
cessity of a historically situated approach which bears in mind the state of
knowledge of and on such disciplines at the time when they are being mustered
for metaphorical purposes. He points out the biological disparities between the
entailments of Hippocrates’ hunches, Harvey’s hypotheses, Avicenna’s assump-
tions or present day DNA evidence. Grounding his arguments on apt and ample
evidence from broad scholarship of 19th century thinking, fittingly contrasted
with that of other periods, he convincingly shows how metaphor imbued the
economic thinking of the time and that the metaphor use and adaptation there
deployed is utterly dependent on the state of knowledge of the times: ‘we find
many mappings that could not have originated earlier or elsewhere than when
and where they did in fact originate.’ He drives the point home with examples
from Spencer, illustrating how a metaphor in earlier times fell short because
the source domain knowledge of that former time lacked the development it
was later to acquire. Conversely, an example from Marshall shows how latter
day economic developments – large joint-stock corporations – are not well cap-
tured by biological metaphors which had functioned aptly at previous stages of
that development. Equally, embodiment must also undergo qualification to take
on board the cultural dimension impinging on it at any particular moment in
history. This whole argument has clear theoretical consequences for Mouton,
leading him to see metaphors as necessarily ‘flexible dynamic processes’ and
consequently to reject the ‘fixed and static’ correspondences of cmt. He can thus
conclude that ‘ by shifting away from the synchronic stance that shapes most
contemporary perspectives on metaphor, one avoids being misled into thinking
that a particular set of mappings constitute a permanent state in a static system,
when it is really just a temporary station in a dynamic process’.
In her chapter, Catherine Resche makes a very strong case for integrating
surface and theory-constitutive metaphors. She gives ample evidence of the im-
portance of the recurring networks of organic and mechanistic metaphors in the
development of economic thinking over the centuries. Her bringing aboard the
metaphors articulating the thinking of non-English speaking economic theorists
is highly welcome. In this respect, how Quesnay’s medical training facilitates
transfer from this source domain to metaphorically characterise economic the-
orizing is particularly relevant. Professor Resche’s approach, therefore, is both
diachronically and culturally sensitive. She singles out the economy is a mech-
anism and the economy is a living organism as the two proto-metaphors
dominating economic thought and she goes on to relate these to different eco-
nomic theorists while at the same time building on concrete linguistic realisa-
tions to establish exhaustive and complete metaphorical networks of each. While
these two proto-metaphors are clearly different approaches, they are neverthe-
less not airtight frames but are shown to admit overlap. On the other hand, the
chapter sees metaphor fulfilling multifunctional roles for economic thinking,
from the heuristic and the catachretic in advancing theory to the exegetical in
getting that theory across. Metaphor awareness is particularly seen as a peda-
gogical asset for the English-for-Specific-Purposes teacher, who, though more
than likely a non specialist in Economics, can grasp from the know-how of his
or her own field the crucial role language plays for the discipline and transmit
this advantage to students. Metaphor can be viewed as a useful teaching device;
as a central organizing principle of all language; as a way of viewing and con-
structing new problems; as a fundamental basis for argument and storytelling.
To gain a larger picture of the metaphorical networks she works on the idea of
a continuum between the root or theory constitutive metaphors and their var-
ious branches across time and place. An example of this method of working
can be seen in the network shown to operate regarding the development of the
euro, prior to its introduction. The notion of the European Monetary Union trig-
gered the marriage metaphor, with all the associated notions of courtship, the
wedding ceremony and the like. Concomitantly, the risks to that Union were
conceived, amongst others, in terms of divorce. Her observation of how surface
metaphors are related to deeper layers of theory-constitutive metaphors and the
cross-fertilization of different fields of knowledge in constant evolution lead
her to propose an observatory of metaphors to monitor the new terms that are
continually coined in response to new concepts or objects.
As Tony Berber Sardinha puts it, the last half century (1960–2010) of Brazil-
ian economics has been dominated ‘by the struggle to defeat inflation’. The eco-
nomic plans of that struggle, he points out, were systematically conceptualised
and linguistically expressed by a series of framing metaphors. The method fol-
lowed in the chapter is quite original in that the author first unveils the different
economic plans Brazil has experienced through a range of metaphors charac-
terizing them and then checks the collocations these plans are associated with
in two corpora. To make plans enacted during the military regime more easily
understandable to the public, policy makers resort to religion, wealth as a cake,
and salary reduction as a rope-tightening stick. Dissatisfaction at the null effect
of these policies and persistent rampant inflation spawn a very wide range of
metaphors throughout the different plans with, amongst others, inflation seen as
a beast, a war, a disease and even as poison. As an antidote to these destructive
metaphors, plans first attempt to explain the economy in terms of commonsense,
as cooking a simple recipe or as a simple everyday task. As the economic situa-
tion becomes dramatic, politicians ask for more desperate efforts in terms of the
classic war-time metonymies of Churchill: ‘sweat’ and ‘sacrifice’ are called on
to ward off the greater evil of ‘blood’ and ‘tears’. Equally, building metaphors
as the desirable stand against the destructive metaphor of fire. Finger-pointing
at store owners and underperforming civil servants and calling on the populace
to be vigilant license a host of metaphors: e.g. the population is a police
force, store managers are thieves, an idle high earning public servant
is a maharajah, among others. When inflation is finally brought to book un-
der Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the ensuing period of Lula da Silva, new
metaphors appear to grasp and get across the new situation: government as
nurturant parent, the country as a family. The essential role of these and
many other metaphors in the last half-century of Brazil’s economic history allow
the author to conclude that it would be ‘hard to imagine such large-scale ini-
tiatives becoming popular or even plausible without major framing metaphors
accompanying them’.
3. Section II
3.1. Cultural filters in Contrastive Studies

The role Cultural filters play in triggering metaphor variation has evolved into a
very dynamic research area within Metaphor studies, particularly over the past
decade (Deignan 2003; Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 2005; Herrera and White
2010; Kövecses, 2005, 2009, 2010; White and Herrera 2004, 2009; Caballero
2007; Jing-Schmidt 2010; Geeraerts and Grondelaers 1995; or Geeraerts et al
2010). On the other hand, the breakneck pace of globalization over that same
decade places cultural issues at the very heart of the Business and Economics
agenda. Not surprisingly, the following four chapters by authors working at
Universities from four different countries of four different languages turn, to
a greater or lesser extent, around this issue. Thus, cultural influences provide
the common thread running through the following chapters. Siaw-Fong Chung’s
contribution deals with the cross-cultural issue of the translation of metaphor-
ical terms between Mandarin and English while Fuertes Olivera and Velasco
Sacristán focus on the translation of English metaphorical accounting terms
into Spanish. A further, and very novel step, is taken by Jeannette Littlemore
who deals not only with the verbal but also with the body language metaphors
in a scenario where a lecturer gets across the same content to culturally and
linguistically distinct receptors. Finally, Belinda Crawford broadens the study
of figurative language and focuses her research on differences between business
and economics lectures with regard to the presence of hyperbole. An individual
and detailed account of each of these contributions is now given.
In this age of exponential growth in business globalisation, translation is
of paramount importance. However, the pressure to deliver rapid if not instant
translation is equally increasing exponentially and this may lead to the overlook-
ing of major factors proper to a language and a culture impinging on translation
and end up with sub-standard results. Insights on translation from cognitive
linguistics can be particularly helpful here (Samaniego Fernández 2010). Siaw-
Fong Chung’s endeavours to analyse the translation of metaphor in two very
genetically distant languages is timely indeed. Her hypothesis is that concep-
tual models may differ from one language to another. To test this hypothesis,
she carries out an empirical study on a backward translation (L2 to L1) of ten
metaphorical key words. She thereby sets out, not only to explore how speakers
of Mandarin understand the metaphoric linguistic realisations of economy in
English explained in terms of a building, person or engine metaphors, but
she also gives quantitative information of the conceptual similarities and dif-
ferences between Mandarin and English and their effects on translation. With
the aid of various statistical tools (Chi-square tests, T-score calculations, One-
Way anova test and Correlation tests), the author provides a very consistent
empirical backing for her claims and a highly technical analysis of transla-
tion contingencies and goes on to compare and contrast her data with both a
Mandarin Chinese and an English Corpus. Evidence is provided to show that
similarities of concepts between Mandarin and English are higher when deal-
ing with the linguistic realisations of the key words related to building. On
the other hand, differences are quite remarkable in the linguistic realisations of
economy when it is understood in terms of a person or an engine. She also
manages to outline the different mechanisms that students tend to activate when
they face the challenge of translating the proposed metaphorical key words into
their mother tongue. Particularly relevant are variables such as likeness of term
in both languages, strength of term collocation in the target language and the
interrelationship of competing strategies such as ‘equivalent term first’ or that
of ‘frequency-effect’. Findings highlight the effect of cross-cultural conceptual
models both on the mechanisms students activate when conceptual differences
prevail and on the degree of difficulty esp Mandarin-English learners have to

overcome when dealing with metaphors.
Research into the linguistic dimension of business has mainly been carried
out, on negotiations, meetings, e-mails, advertising, text books and business
or economics discourse generally. This chapter focuses on the theoretical con-
siderations underpinning the translation of English metaphorical accounting
terms into Spanish. While some lexicographers involved in business and eco-
nomics dictionaries are concerned with the presentation order of the figurative
and literal meanings, Fuertes-Olivera and Pizarro-Sánchez (2002) defend the
idea that the translation of metaphorical terms is not only to be influenced by the
tenets of Cognitive Linguistics but also by the aesthetic function of the metaphor
and the role of English as lingua franca in business/economics. The authors of
the present chapter favour agent models which take on board cognitive, cul-
tural, and sociological perspectives and they share Meyer, Zaluski and Mackin-
tosch’s (1997) analysis of the cognitive and aesthetic functions entailed in the
use of metaphorical terms. They argue that the aim in the translation of English
Metaphorical Accounting Terms into Spanish is to preserve the metaphor at the
macro-level, i.e. as an inter-textual phenomenon and culturally determined. By
means of concrete cases that are illustrative, they provide an accurate analysis
pointing out the different situations a lexicographer may come across: a) cases
where it is possible to reproduce the original conceptual scenario on the basis
that terms offer concepts rather than meanings as can be observed in: health
care cost [coste de prevención y enfermedad]; b) translations where ambiguity
is eliminated whenever possible: goodwill [fondo de comercio versus plusvalı́a]
or if there is no equivalent in Spanish, the English term is maintained: pigs
for example, and an explanatory note is provided; c) cases where the concep-
tual and aesthetic functions are favoured: rebuilding cost [coste de renovación,
ampliación y mejora]. The chapter provides a privileged window from which
to view the criteria driving decision-taking to cope with metaphorical terms in
translating. Of intrinsic interest to translators and translation studies, the chap-
ter additionally shows other readers how being faced with the translation of
metaphor starkly highlights the presence of metaphor and forces it out into the
open. It thereby makes the translator or the general reader consulting translation
highly aware of the mechanism, the frequent difficulty in adequately translating
it and the need to count on criteria and take decisions in doing so.
The use of verbal and gestural metaphor in explanations of Management the-
ory is a highly innovative approach to the study of metaphor, dealing, as it does,
not only with the verbal but also with the body language metaphors. The interac-
tion between a lecturer in Business Management Theory and different types of
audience is studied, posing the research question of whether the use of metaphors
changes in accordance with the professional and linguistic backgrounds of the

people the lecture is addressed to. The author’s aim is to investigate if and in what
ways a British academic adapted her use of verbal and gestural metaphors when
explaining two management science models to four different interlocutors. The
metaphoric density of the texts and co-texts is calculated with the Pragglejaz
(2007) metaphor identification technique and, additionally, the lecturer’s use of
gesture is analyzed. Her focus is mainly on those gestures that are co-expressive
with, or complementary to, metaphors, and on those that contain a strong ele-
ment of metaphor that is not present in the text. The author discovers that the
interaction between verbal and gestural metaphor allows us to learn a great deal
about the different ways in which the speaker is metaphorically “packaging”
her information. There is variation in terms of the amount of verbal and gestu-
ral metaphors used whether the interlocutors are native or non-native or if they
belong to the same discourse community or not. Where non-native speakers are
involved, pedagogical gestural metaphors prevail, whereas if native speakers are
addressed, gestures tend to be more evaluative. With regard to the learning pro-
cess implications, she first highlights that gestures are more likely to be echoed
by non-native speakers than by native speakers, and then that the metaphorically-
used words are more likely to be echoed by interlocutors outside the discourse
community. The chapter is an original qualitative exploratory study in a field
which is clearly under-researched at the present time but which is rapidly grow-
ing in stature. Furthermore, the variables she analyses, comprising within and
outside discourse communities and native and non-native speakers, are factors
of increasing relevance in the ongoing process of globalization of today’s world.
With the starting point that ‘hyperbole is a common feature of everyday con-
versation through which speakers exaggerate reality for affective and evaluative
purposes’ Belinda Crawford goes on to claim the unlikelihood of its occurrence
in academic speech. To verify how, to what extend and to what purpose hyper-
bole does occur in the latter, she sets up her own corpora of authentic business
and economics lectures. Her research focuses first on the presence of hyper-
bole, then on differences between business and economics lectures and, finally,
on the consequence her findings have for teaching. She assumes that there is a
tendency in business lectures to cope with solving problems in real-world busi-
ness contexts while, in economics lectures, the economic phenomena and how
economic agents interact are the issue. Previous research on this field has led
her to restrict her analysis to extreme adjectives and adverbs, overgeneralization
and numerical exaggerations. She uses claws tagger for grammatical tagging
and WordSmith Tool to generate concordances on her search of specific tags and
carries out a hand search to label these expressions as hyperbolic or not. She
presents a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of her data, pointing out that
hyperbole is more typically associated with message-oriented lectures than with

hypothetical reasoning or mathematical models. That would explain the fact that
the use of hyperbole in business lectures outnumbers that of the economic lec-
tures. In her analysis she also comes across expressions of intensifying adverbs
and extreme adjectives such as: ‘absolutely enormous, huge great’ or complex
syntactic structures ‘bigger and bigger giant successful firms’ that are indicative
of the lecturers attempting to be particularly persuasive by using exaggeration
or overstatement. Meanwhile the use of hyperbolic indefinite pronouns is low
and the occurrences of numerical exaggerations hardly appears at all in her data.
Overall, the chapter interestingly broadens the study of figurative language in
business and economics, taking it beyond the major fields of metaphor and
metonymy. Despite the scant expectations, it shows the extensive use of hyper-
bole in business and economics lectures, a finding which the author concludes
underlines the fact that lectures may be becoming increasingly interactional
and informal. Finally, she feels the overall function of the usage to be broadly
rhetorical being instrumental in strengthening opinions or in emphasizing and
evaluating – something which ties up with Holmgreen’s chapter.
4. Section III
4.1. Metaphor in the Economy and Business in practice

The four chapters of this section bring us to very current issues where ‘tex-
tual impact’ (Goatly 1997:1) and context play crucial roles (Eubanks 2000,
Charteris-Black 2005, Semino 2008, Barnden 2009). For instance, a headline
such as “Una patata caliente sobre el tejado de Rodrigo Rato”’[A hot potato
on Rodrigo Rato’s roof] (El Mundo, 2003, April 27) would be bereft of textual
impact and metaphorical force without due contextualisation (Herrera 2008).
Similarly, a headline meaning one thing and the opposite – for example, “Fi-
nancial globalisation can be good or bad” [Business Times (Malaysia), Feb.04,
2003] – can only be disambiguated through context (Herrera 2006). Thus, con-
textual readings permit Philip Eubanks to go far beyond received meaning for
‘Perfect Storm’ and enable him to pursue theoretical issues of metaphor elabora-
tion and extension and come up with unexpected, even apparently paradoxical,
evidence. As Lise-Lotte Holmgreen points out, metaphors are not only used to
provide a better understanding of complex concepts but are decisive in showing
attitudes and in engineering persuasion. These factors are crucial in her anal-
ysis of how frames provide the necessary tools for all the players concerned
with a crisis-immersed Danish Bank. The context is also the axis in the specific
linguistic realisations of certain metaphorical conceptualisations in the case of
project management discourse, in which Hanna Skorczynska shows that the in-
formation, force and impact of the metaphoric realisation comes mainly from
the collocation patterns, that is, from the co-text and context. In the closing
chapter, Hana Blazkova firmly anchors analysis in current real time, showing
how metaphor responds to the pressures of inter-speaker dynamics in the on-
going discourse of the 60 second speech messages of Business Development
Network scenarios. Again each of the chapters is now considered in detail.
Philip Eubanks rephrases the relatively recent expression ‘perfect storm’
in conceptual metaphor terms as multi-faceted problems are coinciding
storms and goes on to explain its metaphorical import and success as stem-
ming from its being an unprecedentedly pithy way of capturing the idea of ‘a
group of mutually exacerbating problems that combine to magnify destruction’.
For all its novelty, he adds, the metaphor sits well with established conceptual
metaphors in the business/economics sphere such as business is (nautical)
travel and economic conditions are weather. Indeed this very fact boosts
the new metaphor’s potential and its chances of establishing itself. On the other
hand, its appropriacy in succinctly capturing the unfolding events of the cur-
rent devastating global crisis should storm proof it – even perfect-storm proof
it – against displaying any weak flanks. However, both Eubanks’ data and his
analysis turns up disquieting results that enables him to show, on the one hand,
how surprising real empirical evidence may turn out to be and, on the other,
to raise novel theoretical issues regarding cmt itself. Crucial to cmt, amongst
other things, is the productivity of the conceptual metaphor in question, the
consistency and logic of its entailments, how it can creatively extend or be
elaborated (Lakoff and Turner 1989:67–72), how variation in usage squares
with conventionality. For all its usage (heading towards a million instances in
Google – though many are obviously not metaphoric), Eubanks’ evidence shows
little extended use of the metaphor and, most surprisingly, he found instances
where uses implied a positive meaning. This jars with the very essence of the
entailments of storm. He discusses the theoretical implications involved here at
large. In doing so, he poses a way out by further elevating the abstractness of
the conceptual metaphor, giving a superordinate that would be indifferent to a
positive or negative divide, capturing the idea of ‘converging multiple causes’
‘leading to a single result’. The problem with this is that it does not just play
down the implications of ‘storm’, it completely erases them. In other words,
this is tantamount to throwing out the child with the bathwater: the essential
ingredients – the destructive or negative implications of ‘storm’ – what powers
the metaphor, are discarded, making ‘Perfect storm an imperfect metaphor’.
Adopting the theoretical stance that the construction and perception of a
brand image ‘takes place collectively’ through the interaction of various play-
ers, Lise-Lotte Holmgreen sets out to document and analyse how the image of
Danske Bank, Denmark’s leading bank, is moulded throughout the Economic
crisis of 2008 to 2009. Her endeavour is to show that framing plays a crucial
role in such construction and that metaphor is particularly influential in guid-
ing that framing process. Frames set up parameters and create expectations. In
the ‘financial crisis frame’, the author exposes how Danske’s chief executive
attempts offloading causality and blame to factors external to the bank, namely,
the global components of the crisis. The other actors involved, the bank’s cus-
tomers and the media bring about a switch to another frame, ‘the management
frame’, forcing the bank to admit endogenous causes. This is particularly well
brought out by a very effective figurative sentence in which the press passes
judgment on the bank’s flawed expansion policy: ‘As the bank grew out of Den-
mark, apparently it also grew out of its carefully fitted bank suit’. The established
metonymy suit for wearer, especially characteristic of the business world (see
Cortés del Rı́o 2010: 97–98) and the concomitant implication that the wearer
of a banker’s suit be equally adorned with prudence, responsibility and good
judgment as hallmark qualities leave the latter particularly exposed or naked
where those qualities are lacking. This leads to a complete change of tack on
the part of the bank, giving rise to the ‘engagement frame’ and again this comes
across metaphorically. While customers’ perceptions of the bank are couched
in orientational and container metaphors, highlighting aloofness and opaque-
ness, the bank addresses this criticism by metaphors which, the author points
out, have a very ordinary quotidian ring for the Danish ear: ‘we have held the
mirror up to ourselves’, ‘we have put on our working clothes’. In this way, the
bank salvages its image and brings about renewed rapport with its clients. In the
whole process, the author claims that metaphors are not only used to provide
understanding of complex or abstract concepts but also as a deliberate means of
showing attitudes and evaluations to the reader and her evidence and analysis
particularly support the latter function.
Metaphor and knowledge specialization in business management: the case
of project management discourse is a very illustrative and well-designed analy-
sis of the way metaphors vary as we move to specific registers. So far, metaphor
in business discourse in general, as well as in its more specialized types has
been studied from different angles but there seems to be no study focusing on
metaphor variation between general management discourse and the sub-field
of project management discourse. In this chapter the hypothesis that more spe-
cialized discourse involves more frequent and varied linguistic realizations of
certain metaphorical conceptualizations is studied. The author draws her evi-
dence of how metaphor vehicle frequencies and metaphor vehicle collocates
behave from her own General Business (gb) and Project Management (pm) cor-
pora. Readers can observe that building, journey and nautical metaphors
are more frequently activated through a wider range of vehicles in the project
management subfield than in general business. Furthermore, the vehicle collo-
cates show distinctive cognitive constructs underlying both types of discourse.
There are several examples to illustrate this point, for instance, the collocates
of the metaphor vehicle “build” focus on business growth and expansion in the
gb corpus whereas in pm discourse they tend to co-occur with words describ-
ing interpersonal relations and communication. By pointing out the importance
of collocation patterns in both types of discourse, she shares, on the one hand,
Weingart’s view of metaphors as adaptable and flexible units of knowledge which
interact with discourses and alter them and, on the other hand, coincides with
Mouton’s claim (in this volume) which sees metaphors as necessarily flexible
dynamic processes. As advancement in science in general and in business in
particular follows the route of specialization, it is of growing interest to chart
metaphorical behaviour which is particular to such specific sub-fields and the
present chapter is pioneering in this respect.
A strategy very much in keeping with our technological age is Business
Development Networks (bdns) where members must condense their Business
message to a 60 second speech. It is intriguing to see the behaviour of metaphor
under the dual pressures of the need to get across and the need to do so un-
der such time restrictions. Dr. Blazkova addresses the role of metaphor in this
precise real life business issue. She provides a well-structured case study where
Olympic sports metaphors are identified by adopting and adapting the Pragglejaz
Group work and the method proposed in Cameron (2007: 206). bdn presenta-
tions are perceived as a dynamic activity in which each participant is constantly
being influenced by others and this holds for metaphor use also. Once intro-
duced, ‘metaphor can be either simply repeated, further developed or dropped’
on a basis of diverse factors influencing speakers. Her main concern lies in the
inter-speaker dynamics of metaphor co-construction and she finds that the echo
metaphor together with the time proximity effect appear to be crucial to how
speakers pick up and appropriate metaphor usage in ongoing discourse. Indi-
vidual speakers not only share lexis, semantic variation and core mappings but
also the role of such dominant systematic metaphors as performance, help-
ing customers and overcoming limitations. Moreover, her analysis shows
how such metaphor use closely impinges on professional and group identity and
on social prototype. All in all the chapter presents revealing data of metaphor
use in a real life area of business that can be considered markedly contempo-
rary and gives a very consistent analysis of how that usage aligns with broader
macro-level dialogic exchanges.
5. Conclusion
Metaphor and Mills, therefore, offers researchers in figurativity in the field spe-
cific area of Business and Economics discourse a wide variety of state of the art
analysis in that field. At the same time, it is of interest to researchers in Metaphor
Studies and Discourse Analysis in general. The collection of chapters pur-
sues cultural and linguistic diversity with researchers contributing from Brazil,
China, Denmark, France, Italy, the UK, the US and Spain. This means raising
awareness of differing scenarios deriving from the major and minor economies
from the so called developed world as well as from emerging economies that are
doubtlessly called on to play a crucial role in the World Economics of today and
the future. Both diachronic and synchronic focus are taken aboard with chapters
ranging from issues such as how language rises to the challenges of the intro-
duction of coinage in Classical-Greece times to a phenomenon so characteristic
of the current age as is Business Networking. Topics also vary from classical
theoretical issues to areas which are only today capturing research attention such
as metaphor and gesture or the translation of metaphor usage, both to and from
L1 and L2, in the fields of Business and Economics. Not only metaphor and
metonymy but other aspects of figurativity, such as hyperbole, are dealt with.
How figurative language is put to diverse use in the dominating contemporary is-
sue of the major economics crisis raging at the present time is also scrutinised.All
chapters are firmly supported by empirical evidence, a number being based on
the researchers’own personal corpora with important pedagogical developments
following from new evidence. On the other hand, while the chapters give compre-
hensive and varied analyses of the workings of figurative language in the fields
of business and economics, evidence and arguments put forward are at the same
time able to call into question or refine a number of theoretical issues of Con-
ceptual Metaphor Theory itself (Mouton, this volume; Eubanks, this volume).
In short, findings contribute to the onward march of both Conceptual Metaphor
Theory and application with the situated use of metaphor analysed and illustrated
in diverse settings within the vast area of Business and Economics. As a result,
Metaphor and Mills could show the reader that metaphor and metonymy have a
strong claim to being the Economy’s most productive linguistic mill or factory.
References
Alejo, Rafael
2010 Where does the money go? An analysis of the container metaphor
in economics: The market and the economy. Journal of Pragmatics,
Volume 42 (4): 1137–1150.
Aristotle
1991 Rhetoric. London: Penguin. (Translation: H. Lawson-Tancred).
Backhouse, Roger
2002 The Penguin history of Economics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Barnden, John
2009 Metaphor and Context: a perspective from Artificial Intelligence. In
Metaphor and Discourse, Andreas Musolff and Jörg Zinken (eds.),
79–94: Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Blair, Hugh
1783/1823 Lectures on rhetoric and belles letters. London: J.F.Dove.
Boers, Frank
1999 When a bodily source domain becomes prominent:The joy of counting
metaphors in the socio-economic domain. In Metaphor in Cognitive
Linguistics, Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerard J. Steen, (eds.), 47–56.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Brône, Geert and Kurt Feyaerts
2005 Headlines and cartoons in the economic press: Double grounding as
a discourse supportive strategy. In Language, communication and the
economy, G. Erreygers and Geert Jacobs (eds.), 73–99. Amsterdam,
John Benjamins.
Brône, Geert and Seana Coulson
2010 Processing deliberate ambiguity in newspaper headlines: Double
grounding. Discourse Processes, 47(3): 212–236.
Caballero, Rosario
2007 Review of Zoltán Kövecses’ Metaphor in Culture. Universality and
Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Metaphor
and Symbol 22 (11): 109–118.
Cameron, Lynne
2007 Patterns of metaphor use in reconciliation talk. Discourse and Society,
18:197–222.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2004 Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Pal-
grave and Macmillan
2005 Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Coates, David
1994 The question of UK decline. New York & London: Harvester Wheat-
sheaf.
Cortés de los Rı́os, Marı́a Enriqueta
2010 Cognitive devices to communicate the economic crisis. iberica, 20:
81–106.
Cowling, David
2009 ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’: Linguistic mercantilism in Re-
naissance France. In Metaphor and discourse, Andreas Musolff and
Jörg Zinken (eds.), 190–204. Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Crawford Camiciottoli, Belinda
2007 The Language of Business Studies Lectures: A corpus-assisted anal-
ysis. [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series n. 157] Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Dasgupta, Partha
2007 Economics. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Deignan, Alice
2003 Metaphorical expressions and culture: An indirect link. Metaphor and
Symbol, 18 (4), 255–271.
Dirven, René, Hawkins, Bruce and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.)
2001 Language and Ideology. Vol.I. Theoretical cognitive processes. Ams-
terdam: John Benjamins.
Dirven, René, Roslyn Frank and Ilie, Cornelia (eds.)
2001 Language and Ideology. Vol. II. Descriptive cognitive Approaches.
Dobrovols’skij, Dmitrij and Elisabeth Piirainen
2005 Figurative language: Cross-cultural and cross linguistic perspectives.
Current Research in the Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface, Volume 13.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Erreygers Guido and Geert Jacobs (eds.)
2005 Language, communication and the economy. Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins.
Eubanks, Philip
2000 A war of words in the discourse of trade. The rhetorical constitution of
metaphor. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press.
Forceville, Charles
2002 The identification of target and source in pictorial metaphors. Journal
of Pragmatics 34/1:1–14.
Frank, Roslyn M.
2009 Shifting identities: Metaphors of discourse evolution. In Metaphor
and Discourse, Andreas Musolff and Jörg Zinken (eds), 173–189.
Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Frank, Roslyn M, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernárdez (eds.)
2008 Body, Language and Mind, Volume 2; Sociocultural Situatedness.
Cognitive Linguistics Research 35.2. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A. and Isabel Pizarro-Sánchez
2002 Translation and ‘similarity-creating metaphors’. Target 14 (1): 43–73.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A., Marisol Velasco-Sacristán, Ana Arribas-Baño and Eva

Samaniego Fernández
2001 Persuasion and advertising English. Metadiscourse in slogans and
headlines. Journal of Pragmatics 33 (8): 1291–1307.
Fukuda Kosei
2009 A comparative study of metaphors representing the US and Japanese
economies. Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 41 (9): 1693–1702.
Geeraerts, Dirk and Stefan Grondelaers
1995 Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In Language and the
cognitive construal of the world, John R. Taylor and Robert E.
MacLaury (eds.), 153–179. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter
Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsman (eds.)
2010 Advances In Cognitive Sociolinguistics, Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter
Goatly, Andrew
1997 Critical reading and writing. London: Routledge.
Goatly Andrew
2007 Washing the Brain. Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gibbs, Raymond W. (ed.)
2008 The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hayes, Steven C., Linda J. Hayes and Hayne W. Reese
1988 Finding the philosophical core: A review of Stephen C. Pepper’s World
hypotheses: A study in evidence. Journal of Experimental Analysis of
Behavior, 50: 97–111.
Henderson, Willie
1982 Metaphor in Economics. Economics, 18(4): 147–153.
Henderson, Willie
1994 Metaphor and Economics. In New directions in economics methodol-
ogy. Roger E. Backhouse (ed.), 343–367. London: Routledge.
Herrera Soler, Honesto
2006 Conceptual metaphor in press headlines on globalisation. Annual Re-
view of Cognitive Linguistics. 4: 1–20.
Herrera Soler, Honesto
2008 A metaphor corpus in business press headlines. iberica, 15: 51–70.
Herrera, Honesto and Michael White
2010 Canonicity and variation in idiomatic expressions: Evidence from
business press headlines. In Fostering language teaching efficiency
through Cognitive Linguistics, Sabine De Knop, Frank Boers and
Antoon De Rycker (eds), 167–187. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter
Mouton
Jäkel, Olaf
1993 Economic growth versus pushing up the gnp: Metaphors of quantity
from the economic domain. Duisburg. laud paper No.24.
Jeffreys, D.
1982 Metaphor and Economics – an illustrative appendix. Economics, 18(4):
154–157.
Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo
2010 Seven events in three languages: Culture-specific conceptualizations
and their implications for flt. In: Fostering Language Teaching Effi-
ciency through Cognitive Linguistics, Sabine De Knop, Frank Boers
and Antoon De Rycker (eds), 137–165. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter
Mouton
Koller, Veronica
2004a Metaphor and gender in business media discourse:A critical cognitive
study. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Koller, Veronica
2004b Businesswomen and war metaphors: possessive, jealous and ‘pugna-
cious?’ Journal of Sociolinguists, 8 (1): 3–22.
Koller, Veronica and Michael Farrelly
2010 Darstellungen der Finanzkrise 2007/08 in den britischen Printmedien.
Aptum. Zeitschrift fuer Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur 3.
Kövecses, Zoltán
2005 Metaphor in culture. Universality and variation. Cambridge: Cam-
2009 The effect of context on the use of metaphor in discourse. iberica, 17:
11–24.
Kovecses, Zoltán
2010 A new look at metaphorical creativity in cognitive linguistics. Cogni-
tive Linguistics, 21 (4): 663–697.
Knop, Sabine De
1985 Linguistic and extralinguistic aids for reconstruction and interpreta-
tion of metaphors in headlines. In The Ubiquity of metaphor. Metaphor
in language and thought. Wolf Paprotté and René Dirven (eds), 243–
252. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Turner
1989 More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Lindstromberg, Seth
1991 Metaphor and esp: A ghost in the machine? English for Specific Pur-
poses 10 (3): 207–225.
López Maestre, Maria Dolores
2000 The business of cognitive stylistics: A survey of conceptual metaphors
in business English. Atlantis, XXII (1): 47–69.
McCloskey, Deirdre N.
1985 The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison. WI: The University of Wiscon-
sin Press.
Martı́n de la Rosa, Maria Victoria
2009 The role of pictorial metaphor in magazine advertising. Revista Ali-
cantina de Estudios Ingleses 22: 167–180.
Marshall, Alfred
1890/1920 Principles of Economics (8th Edition). London: Macmillan and Co.,
Ltd.
Mason, Mary
1990 Dancing on air: An analysis of a passage from an economics text book.
In The language of economics: The analysis of economics discourse.
Anthony Dudley-Evans and Willie Henderson (eds), 16–28. London:
Modern English Publications in association with the British Council.
Mata, Tiago and Clair Lemercier
2011 Speaking in tongues, a text analysis of economic opinion and News-
week, 1975–2007 Duke University: hope Centre Working Papers No.
2011–02.
Meyer, Ingrid, Victoria Zaluski and Kristen Mackintosch
1997 Metaphorical Internet Terms: A Conceptual and Structural Analysis.
Terminology 4 (1): 1–33.
Mirowski, Philip
1991 More heat than light: Economics as social Physics, Physics as nature’s
Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Musolff, Andreas
2004 Metaphor and political discourse. Analogical reasoning in debates
about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Musolff, Andreas
2009 Metaphor in the history of ideas and discourses: How can we inter-
pret a Medieval version of the Body-State analogy? In Metaphor and
discourse, Andreas Musolff and Jörg Zinken (eds), 233–247. Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Musolff, Andreas and Zinken, Jörg (eds.)
2009 Metaphor and discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Pepper, Stephen C.
1942 World hypotheses: A study in evidence. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Pragglejaz Group
2007 A practical and flexible method for identifying metaphorically-used
words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1–40
Rojo López, Ana Marı́a and Orts Llopis, Marı́a Angeles
2010 Metaphorical pattern analysis in financial texts: Framing the crisis
in positive or negative metaphorical terms. Journal of Pragmatics,
Volume 42 (12): 3300–3313
Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco and Lorena Pérez Hernández

2011 The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: Myths, Developments and
Challenges. Metaphor and Symbol, 26: 161–185.
Samaniego Fernández, Eva
2010 Translation Studies and the cognitive theory of metaphor. Review of
Cognitive Linguistics. Vol. 9/1: 262–279.
Samuelson, Paul A. and William D. Nordhaus
1992 Economics (14th Ed). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Semino, Elena
2008 Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Geoff P.
1995 How high can a dead cat bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock
Market. Hong Kong Papers in linguistics and language teaching, 18:
43–57.
Steen, Gerard J., Alleta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal and Tina Krenn-
mayr
2010 Metaphor in Usage. Cognitive Linguistics. 21 (4): 765–796.
Taylor, John R. and Robert E. MacLaury (eds.)
1995 Language and the cognitive construal of the world. Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter
White, Michael
2003 Metaphor and Economics: the case of growth. English for Specific
Purposes, Vol 22: 131–151.
White, Michael and Honesto Herrera
2003 Metaphor and ideology in the press coverage of telecom corporate
consolidations. In Cognitive models in Language and thought, Dirven,
René, Roslyn Frank and Martin Pütz, (eds.), 277–323. Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
White, Michael
2006 Language synergies and communication felicity. In A pleasure of life
in words. A Festschrift for Angela Downing, Marta Carretero, Laura
Hidalgo, Julia Lavid, Elena Martı́nez, JoAnne Neff, Soledad Pérez
de Ayala and Esther Sánchez-Pardo (eds). Vol I: 561–588. Madrid:
Universidad Complutense.
2009 How business press headlines get their message across: a different per-
spective on metaphor. In Metaphor and Discourse. Andreas Musolff
and Jörg Zinken (eds), 135–152. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
White, Michael, Honesto Herrera and Marian Amengual
2004 Interrelation between content and expression in news headlines. In:
Current trends of languages for specific purposes in an international
and multicultural context, Inmaculada Sanz and Ángel F. Lago (eds.),
239–249. Granada: Universidad de Granada.
Section I
Metaphor in economic theory and in
economics as an academic discipline
From barter to coin: Shifting cognitive frames in
Classical Greek economy
Abstract
The sixth-century polis has been recognised to be the first society in history, with the
exception of China, to be pervaded by money (Harris 2010, Cohen 1992, Mahon 1999,
Backhouse 2001). The contribution aims to frame the beginnings of Greek coinage
within a wider cultural linguistic model, analysing evidence from selected terms of Greek
vocabulary, in order to throw new light on how an old economy governed by traditional
social motivations turns into a new one in which monetary acquisition prevails. For that
purpose a corpus of fourteen, richly polysemous 6th century bc Greek words, whose
meanings had eventually evolved to that of “coin” or developed a clear economic sense,
was selected and carefully analyzed according to metaphorical and metonymical lines, as
laid down in relevant Greek dictionaries. The lexical and semantic comparison between
8th century and 6th century bc economic terms and meanings confirms that two different
imaginary frames of interaction are to be reconstructed for either period.
1. Introduction and aim of the contribution
The sixth-century polis has been recognised to be the first society in history,
with the exception of China, to be pervaded by money (Harris 2010, Cohen
1992, Mahon 1999, Backhouse 2001). Thus, our aim is to frame the beginnings
of Greek coinage within a wider cultural linguistic model, analysing evidence
from selected terms of Greek vocabulary, in order to throw new light on how an
old economy governed by traditional social motivations turns into a new one in
which monetary acquisition prevails.
As Harris (2010: 1) stated, “for decades the history of money in the classical
world was. . . almost universally supposed to be synonymous with the study of
numismatics”. Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, a new line of stud-
ies emerged1 . An understanding of the ancient economy was thought to require
1. Schaps (2010: 38–9) highlights the importance of nineteenth and twentieth century
pioneers, especially Polanyi and Finley, in the creation of this new sensibility.
28 Paloma Tejada Caller and Antonio Guzmán Guerra
classicists to emerge from their cocoons. The contribution of scholars with wider
interests in economic and cultural history changed the focus of attention from
coined money to the differences between primitive or pre-monetary societies
and monetized ones. Two traditions seem to have contended with the issue: for-
malists – more prone to pay attention to economic principles – and primitivists –
who held that non-economic dimensions and meanings were far more impor-
tant to the ancient than purely economic ones (Morley 2004, in Harris 2010:
11; Inham 2004). Contributing their views on two different monetary systems,
both formalists and primitivists enriched the debate with insightful concepts
and polarities around which current ideas revolve. This is the case of special-
purpose vs all-purpose money, coinage vs non-coinage money, token vs bullion
currency, bullion as wealth or as a transactional medium, which among other
tools of inquiry enlighten recent approaches to sixth century bc Greek economy.
In current debates there seems to be little doubt that a modern concept of
money first arose with Greek coinage or that the Athenian citizens passed from
the use of special-purpose money to that of all purpose money somewhere
between the Dark Ages and the Classical Age2 . That is, they conceived of all
their worldly possessions as having monetary equivalents (Schaps 2010: 42;
Schaps 2004). However, no matter how ample this research has been, three
points are to be raised:
a. More or less radical attitudes may be perceived on the description of the
particular process. In other words, the main unsettled issues nowadays are
apparently concerned with the detailed description of the ‘route’ towards
this modern monetized society, and its intermediate, transitional and overlap
stages, if one is to recognise them at all3 .
2. As expressed in Aristotle (Polit I, 9.14): “As the benefits of commerce were more
widely extended by importing commodities of which there was a deficiency and
exporting those of which there was an excess, the use of currency was an indispensable
device. As the necessaries of nature were not all easily portable, people agreed for
purposes of barter mutually to give and receive some article which, while it was itself
a commodity, was practically easy to handle in the business of life: some such article
as iron or silver, was at first defined simply by size and weight, although finally they
went further and set a stamp upon every coin to relieve them from the trouble of
weighing it, as the stamp impressed upon the coin was an indication of quantity”.
3. Relevant topics in contemporary research seem to be the potential coexistence of
coinage and non-coinage money in the Greek world; evidence pertaining to geo-
graphical and social fringes, as opposed to that of central and political Athens; subtle
distinctions between domestic and foreign trade; the idea of non-coinage all-purpose
money; the extent to which credit money was used; the subject of fiduciary money or
b. Even in settled issues some kind of modern bias may be perceived. Scholars
seem to find it difficult to free themselves from modern preconceptions, a fact
often leading to the building of the past from its outcomes through the glori-
fication of successful structures. More precisely, if monetization implies, as
has been said, the use of an item that fulfils all the functions today identified
as being monetary (Schaps 2010: 40), prices, trade and the various kinds of
payments are given undue prominence versus other non-monetary transac-
tions with which they initially shared a general frame of exchange. Second,
all too often one of the senses given to money is that of “measure of wealth”
(Scheidel 2010: 267), whence follows that the idea of wealth is frequently
acknowledged only in terms of money, which might not necessarily be so.
And third, the identification of value and preciousness in coinage is normally
taken for granted, unquestioned against alternatives.
c. As regards cultural debates, a positive linguistic approach which might con-
tribute to the discussion of these and similar topics seems to be lacking. Hence
our (first and modest) contribution derives from focussing on the diachronic
revision of a selected corpus of Greek words.
Results in our analysis respond to major cultural and historical linguistics prin-
ciples (Johnson 1987, Fillmore 1985, Goatly 1997, Hymes 1977, Lakoff 1980,
Palmer 1996, Sapir 1921, Brinton and Traugott 2005), according to which lin-
guistic knowledge is taken to be part of cultural knowledge. The vocabulary of
a language is seen as intrinsically related to its people’s Weltanschauung, under-
stood as the sum of conventional cognitive models, cultural premises, scenes,
social situations and values. More specifically, it may be said to be part of a
mental representation, corresponding to an intermediate level of abstraction,
that is, an imagined scheme connected to physical or social experiences. Thus,
the grammatical and lexical resources of a language constitute a useful strat-
egy to describe categories and relations established in the speakers’ conceptual
schemes, as integrated in language-specific ‘conceptions of the world’. Under
these assumptions, dictionaries would act as repositories of stable patterns of
meaning; inventories of agreed imagery, from which new and situated meanings
would emerge. When reconstructing a particular cultural model each word may
be said to correspond to a particular part or perspective. That is, by analysing
word meaning particular details of the associated frame are accessed. As human
categorization works through complex associative metaphorical and metonymi-
cal processes, evoked by these more general imagined frames, metaphor and
the role of state authority in the completion of the process (cf. Le Rider 2001, Back-
house 2001, Harris 2010, Schaps 2010, Seiford 2004, Kroll 2010, Scheidel 2010).
metonymy act as the necessary tools not only to analyse complex entities, but
to describe developmental stages in a particular process.
As it appears, emergent cognitive models associated with the concept of ex-
change are being projected on the minds of sixth century bc Greek speakers,
a fact grounded in interactional and habitual forms of behaviour and reflected
in the vocabulary of the language. That is, from the sixth century bc onwards
interactions between people are assumed to have changed and the central im-
ages of exchange as balanced equivalence, value as preciousness and
wealth as goods needed for self-sufficiency seem to have been altered,
as evidenced by lexical and semantic changes undergone during the Classical
period by Greek words inherited from Homeric times.
2. Corpus and Methodology
A corpus of fourteen, richly polysemous sixth century bc Greek words, whose

meanings had eventually evolved to that of “coin” or developed a clear eco-
nomic sense, was selected and carefully analyzed according to metaphorical
and metonymical lines, as laid down in relevant Greek dictionaries: Liddell
(1843, 1968), Chantraine (1977), Fitrakis (1990) (see Table 1). Words ana-
lyzed include: argýrion Çrg‘rion, árgyros ärgnroc, chalcós qalkÏc, chrysós
qrusÏc, drachmé draqm†, électron ¢lektron, statér stat†r, mna mnê,
nómisma nÏmisma , obelós ÊbolÏc, tálanton tàlanton, tókos tàkoc and
trápedsa tràpexa . To the list the term chréma qr®ma was added, since most
current studies refer to the storage of wealth as being monetary.
Dictionary information was then filtered and chronologically assigned to
two historical moments relevant to our purposes: the so-called Homeric period
(or pre sixth century bc times) and sixth – fourth century bc meanings and
occurrences. Word creation, word loss, and relevant semantic changes were
consequently registered and interpreted.
The interpretation of the data allowed for the reconstruction of two different
imagery frames of exchange situations as lexically expressed, corresponding to
either stage. A primitive coherent cognitive model, from which new meanings
emerge, gives way to a resulting one where modern conceptions of money crop
up among significant remnants of the older system. This new cognitive model
shapes and mirrors a different conception of exchange situations, conditioning
the minds of the Greeks for future developments.
The analysis of word changes in sixth century bc Greek seems to give cogni-
tive grounding to some of the unsettled issues as defined above and throw light
on intermediate developmental stages.
Table 1. Greek terms and their dictionary meanings.
GREEK Homer 6th c b.C. 5th–4th c. bC 3rd BC –4th AD Hellenistic- Later

TERMS (8th–7th c) Roman Period times
Argýrion Small coin
Money
Árgyros Silver Silver Silver
Silver white Rare: silver coin
Chalcós Copper, bronze Cauldron, urn Copper money Base
Ornaments of a A weight metal
house/Ornamental and of-
fering commodity
First metal that men learnt
to smelt and work
Anything made of metal
Cauldron, urn Payment of
ransom Prize
Chréma Goods, property Chremata, Need
(Generally) thing, matter, chremata, Merchandise
affair aner
Chrysós Gold (Used by poets to denote) Gold
Golden armour or raiment anything dear or precious
(non-economic sense)
Drachmé What one can hold in the A weight and money Basic coin
hand A silver coin
Électron Amber (piece of) Pegs of a lire Amber
Alloy of gold and silver
Mna A weight
(mina) A sum of money (wealth,
earnings)
Nómisma Anything sanctioned by Pieces of money
From barter to coin: Shifting cognitive frames in Classical Greek economy
current usage, custom. Name of a coin

Current coin
Full legal measure
31
Table 1. (continued)
32
GREEK Homer 6th c b.C. 5th–4th c. bC 3rd BC –4th AD Hellenistic- Later

TERMS (8th–7th c) Roman Period times
Obelós Spit Spit As a weight spit/nails (iron) False, in-
Prizes, Gifts Used both as a weight and a authentic
coin
A thing of which you get
much or little for an obol.
Statér A weight A weight
Standard coin struck in vari- (Jewish shekel)
ous metals
One who owes money (debtor)
Tálanton Scale to weigh the fortunes Balance Balance. Talent
of men when Zeus decides Tax paid for the use of the
the issue of battle. public scale.
Scales of Justice. A commercial weight.
Anything weighed: a defini- Sum of money represented by
tive weight, talent (of gold), the corresponding weight of
probably not great gold or silver.
Money used in weighing lead,
iron, cloth.
Tókos Childbirth, parturition The time of parturition
Offspring, of men or Period of gestation
animals Produce of money lent, hence

interest
Trápedsa Dining/eating-table Dining/eating-table Table dedicated to the gods Bank
The board The board (meats and offerings)
Live at other men’s table, at
their expense
Prov. of a spendthrift
Table as implying what is
upon it (meal)
Money changer’s counter
Most frequently bank
Any table or flat surface on
which sth rests (. . . )
Table 2. Comprehensive inventory of money related terms, sources where used and their diachronic evolution.
GREEK MEANING ( S ) TESTIMONIES CENTURY LITERARY

TERMS GENRE
Argýrion 1. Small coin 1. Aristophanes, Frogs/Aves/ 1. 5th bc/4th bc 1. Comedy/History

2. Money Xenophon, Oeconom. 2. 5th bc 2. Comedy
2. Aristophanes, Ploutos
Árgyros 1. Silver 1. Herodotus/Thucydides/Plato, Al- 1. 5th bc./5ht bc/5th bc 1. History/

2. Rare: silver coin cibiad. Philosophy
Chalcós 1. Copper 1. Homer, Iliad 1. 8th bc (already 1. Epic

2. Ornaments of a 2. Homer, Od. Mycenic) 2. Epic
house/Ornamental and offering 3. Hesiod, Opera 2. 8th bc 3. Didactic Epic
commodity 4. Homer, Iliad 3. 7th bc 4. Epic
3. First metal that men learnt to 5. Homer, Od. 4. 8th bc 5. Epic/Tragedy
smelt and work Sophocles, Electra 5. 8th bc/ 5th bc 6. Epic
4. Anything made of metal 6. Homer, Iliad 6. 8th bc 7. Biography
5. Cauldron, urn 7. Plutarch and inscriptions 7. 1st –2nd ad/4th bc 8. Medicine
6. Payment of ransom 8. Galen 8. 2nd ad
7. Copper money
8. A weight (1/8 obolós)
Chréma 1. Need 1. Xenophon, Oeconom. 1. 4ht bc 1. History

2. Goods, property 2. Homer, Od./ 2. 8th bc/4th bc 2. Epic/Philosophy
3. Merchandise 3. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 3. 4th bc 3. Lyric
4. ‘Money makes the man’ 4.Pindar Istmic 4. 6th bc 4. Oratory
5. Debts 5. Demosth 5. 4th bc 5. Epic
6. (Generally) thing, matter, affair 6. Hesiodus, Opera 6. 7th bc
Chrysós 1. Gold 1. Homer (already Mycenic)/ Solon 1. 8th bc/6th bc 1. Epic/ Lyric
2. Golden armour or raiment 2. Homer, Iliad 2. 8th bc 2. Epic

3. (Used by poets to denote) any- 3. Aeschylus/Sophocles/ 3. 5th bc 3. Tragedy
thing dear or precious Euripides
33
34

TERMS GENRE
Drachmé 1. What one can hold in the 1. Homer, Iliad 1. 8th bc 1. Epic
hand 2. Herodotus 2. 5th bc 2. History
2. A weight and money 3. Herodotus/ Aristophanes 3. 5th bc/ 5th bc 3. History/Comedy
3. A silver coin
Électron 1. Amber (piece of) 1. Homer, Od. 1. 8th bc 1. Epic
2. Alloy of gold and silver 2. Homer, Od. 2. 8th bc 2. Epic
3. Pegs of a lire 3. Aristophanes, Eq. 3. 5th bc 3. Comedy
Mna 1. A weight = 100 drachmes 1. Herodotus 1. 5th bc 1. History
(mina) 2. A sum of money (wealth, 2. Antipho. 2. 5th bc 2. Rhetoric
earnings)
Nómisma 1. Anything sanctioned by cur- 1. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripi- 1. 5th bc 1. Tragedy.
rent usage, custom des. 2. 6th / 5th / 4th bc 2. History/Comedy/
2. Current coin 2. Herodotus/Aristophanes/ 3. 2nd ad Philosophy
3. Pieces of money Aristotle, Eth. 4. 5th bc 3. Grammar
4. Full legal measure 3. Herodianus 5. 5th –6th ad 4. Comedy
5. Name of a coin 4. Aristophanes 5. Epigraphy
5. Inscriptions
Obelós 1. Spit 1. Homer, Iliad/ Herodotus 1. 8th bc/ 5th bc 1. Epic/History
2.Used both as a weight and a 2. Aristophanes, Nub. 2. 5th bc. 2. Comedy

coin 3. Antipho./ Aristophanes, Eq. 3. 5th bc/ 5th bc 3. Oratory/Comedy
3. A thing of which you get 4. Galen, 13,295 4. 2nd ad 4. Medicine
much or little for an obol.
4. As a weight spit/nails (iron)
Statér 1. A weight 1. Eupolis /Pollux 1. 5th bc/ 2nd ad 1. Comedy/Rhetoric
2. Standard coin struck in vari- 2. Aristophanes, Pl./ Plato, 2. 5th bc. 2. Comedy/
ous metals Eutdy. 3. 1st ad Philosophy
3. Jewish shekel 3. Ev. Matt. 4. 6th –5th bc. 3. Religion
4. One who owes money 4. Epich. 4. Comedy
(debtor)

TERMS GENRE
Tálanton 1. Balance 1. Theognis/ AEschylus, Supp./ 1. 6th bc/ 5th bc/5th bc 1. Lyric/
2. Scale to weigh the fortunes of men when Zeus Aristophanes, Ra. 2. 8th bc Tragedy/Comedy
decides the issue of battle 2. Homer, Iliad 3. ??? 2. Epic
3. Scales of Justice 3. Homeric Hymns 4. 6th bc 3. Epic
4. Tax paid for the use of the public scale 4. Inscriptions sig 4.7 5. 8th bc 4. Epigraphy
5. Anything weighed: a definitive weight, talent (of 5. Homer (always pl.), Iliad, 6. 5th bc 5. Epic
gold), probably not great Od. 7. 5th bc 6. History
6. A commercial weight. 6. Herodotus 8. 5th bc/4th bc/ 4th bc 7. History
7. Sum of money represented by the corresponding 7. Herodotus 8. History/History/
weight of gold or silver 8. Herodotus/Xenophon, Oratory
8. Money used in weighing lead, iron, cloth hg./Aeschines
Tókos 1. Childbirth, parturition 1. Homer, Iliad/ Aristotle, ha 1. 8th bc/ 4th bc 1. Epic/Philosophy
2. The time of parturition 2. Herodotus 2. 5th bc 2. History
3. Period of gestation 3. Aristotle, Gener. Animalium 3. 4th bc 3. Philosophy
4. Offspring, of men or animals 4. Homer, Iliad, Od. 4. 8th bc 4. Epic
5. (Metaph.): produce of money lent, hence interest 5. Plato, Resp./Aristotle, 5. 5th bc/ 4th bc/ 5th bc 5. Philoso-
6. Double sense (offspring/interest) Pol./Aristophanes, Nu. 6. 5th bc phy/Philosophy/
6. Aristophanes, Th. Comedy
6. Comedy
Trápedsa 1. Dining/eating-table 1. Homer, Iliad, Od./ 1. 8th bc/ 5th bc 1. Epic/History
2. The board Herodotus 2. 8th bc/ 5th bc 2. Epic/Tragedy
3. Live at other men’s table, at their expense 2. Homer, Od./ Aeschylus, Ag. 3. 4th bc 3. History
4. Prov of a spendthrift 3. Xenophon, Anab. 4. 4th bc 4. Oratory
5. Table dedicated to the gods (meats and offer- 4. Andocides 5. 2nd bc? 5. Epigraphy
ings) 5. Inscriptions 6. 5th bc/ 5th bc 6. History/Tragedy
6. Table implying what is upon it 6. Herodotus/ Eurip, Alcestis 7. 5th bc/ 4th bc/ 4th bc 7. Philosophy/
(meal) 7. Plato, Apology/ Lysias/ 8. 4th bc. Oratory/Oratory
7. Money changer’s counter Demosth. 9. 4th bc 8. Oratory

8. Most frequently bank (. . . ) 8. Lysias 9. Comedy
9. Any table or flat surface on which sth rests (. . . ) 9. Aristophanes
35
3. Results
Results show that eighth century bc Greek monetary vocabulary mirrors a lim-
ited and conceptually basic imagined frame of exchange. From a structural
and semantic point of view, the first set of terms includes five basic words
referring to utensils and substances for exchange: árgyros ‘white metal’, ‘sil-
ver’, chrysós ‘gold’ and électron ‘amber’, ‘alloy of gold and silver’ as mere
substances, chalcós ‘copper’, ‘bronze’, ‘offering commodity’, ‘cauldron’, ‘urn’
and obelós ‘spit’ as both utensils and substances. To these two deverbal nouns
are added: drachmé, ‘what one can hold in the hand’ and tálanton, ‘Zeus’s scales
of fate and justice’, ‘anything weighed’ or ‘weight’. These deverbal nouns are
to be noticed as the grammaticalized expression of the main activities involved
in exchange situations.
A neat pre-monetary framework is thus to be reconstructed where utensils,
base and precious metals were apparently used in different kinds of exchange
situations, i.e. played the role of special-purpose money, and where measures
seemed to be defined by size and weight. The metaphors and metonymies in-
volved in the categorization of concepts prove very straightforward: object for
activity tálanton, object for substance chalcós, anatomical metaphors drachmé,
etc. and most meanings remain close to the concrete realm. Obviously there is
no linguistic evidence of coinage. The conclusion that objects or commodities
exchanged in different situations reflect a specialized use may also be drawn.
Chalcós is apparently preferred to pay ransom and as prizes; obelós as prizes
and gifts of hospitality; árgyros for transactional activities and payments (see
Table 1, Schaps 2010: 40 ff, Kroll 2010: 14 ff). This all means that in the ini-
tial stage, exchange reveals itself as a main activity realized in different social
spheres. Individuals would commonly involve in a various array of exchange
situations, payment, prizes, gifts of hospitality, ransom, bribery, damage reward,
religious tributes, taxes to cover natural necessities or fulfil kin, social or reli-
gious duties. In each case different items would be exchanged or compensated;
there was no singular and unique object of exchange and the various exchang-
ing items shared function. Exchange imagined situations would evoke spits,
drinking cups, food, mattresses, base and precious metals and probably love and
honour.
As lexically implied, general exchange, as a common and pervasive way of
social interaction, would be governed by the idea of equivalence, and most
important to our aims, of equilibrium, as reflected in the word tálanton: ex-
change was conceived of in terms of balanced contribution, reciprocity or com-
pensation4 . Furthermore, it must be mentioned that compensation seems to be

grounded on the idea of mutual agreement. This means that exchanges were
settled through appropriate units of value customarily acceptable to both sides;
value was agreed according to customary laws of reciprocity.A later metonymi-
cal sense of obelós, ‘what you get for an obol, much or little’, comes to confirm
this practice5 .And the same may be said about the word nómisma, a sixth century
bc derivation inheriting the idea of custom sanctioned by society (see below).
In this scheme of moral, customarily agreed compensation, reward appears
very much related to the concept of limit. This contributes to explaining the
initial meaning of chréma, ‘need, goods, property, things, matter, affair’, as lex-
icographically defined. Eighth – seventh century bc ‘wealth’ suggests no com-
mercial nuance and proves individually bound. Moreover, its sense of (inherited
or stored) property or of needs to be covered in order to keep self-sufficiency re-
mains a somewhat static concept, as is the idea of equilibrium mentioned above.
This lack of movement which seems to regulate the ancient frame of economy
is reinforced by the fact that at this stage there is no concept of yield as time-
bound profit lexically expressed and the existence of a dynamic banking activity
different from storing is still being debated (cf. Schaps 2010 and Kroll 2010).
According to lexicographical data, the conclusion that the Homeric imagined
frame of exchange was closely related to those of myth and preciousness
should be drawn. It is to be noted that all the words in the eighth century bc
corpus reveal mythical or precious evocations, but for drachmé and obelós.
Árgyros, as chalcós, chrysós, électron and tálanton, evoke a mythical and sa-
cred frame in their common uses6 . The beauty of gold and silver as precious
metals is naturally and culturally recognised, as seen in the reference to golden
armours and raiments or to silver vessels. Close to them, électron was also pre-
4. It is worth noting that the idea of paying, as Kroll (2010: 17) insightfully alleges, was
expressed through the verb hı́stemi ‘weigh out’, literally ‘compensate’. On the idea of
reciprocity, as underlined in Cohen (1992: 208) “the earliest – and long persisting –
signification of eranos. . . was merely a reciprocal contribution. Homer describes
eranoi as joint meals to which each of the participants contributed his appropriate
share”.And in note: In philosophical argument, Plato utilized the contributory concept
of the eranos in metaphorical extension (See Symp. 177c)”.
5. This subconscious cultural premise helps to understand barter or the varying weights
taken to represent drachmaı́, but goes much further. Aristotle’s theory of justice
includes as a main type that of commutative justice: a deal is said to be just simply
when both parts express their will to accept the exchange (Nicomachean Ethics).
6. See for instance, the reference to Zeus’ scale to weigh the heroes’ souls (Il. XXII);
or the mentioning of électron, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, also
meaning amber, in the Od. (the word evoking the image of ‘sun’s glare’).
cious and valuable as a natural substance; and utensils made of chalcós had a
recognised ornamental function. That means that when Homeric people used any
of the words belonging to their pre-monetary frame of exchange, the imagined
frames of myth and preciousness opened up in their minds simultaneously.
This reveals an essential notion. The idea of value in eighth century bc Greek
seemed to be a mixture of preciousness and sacredness. Things were appreciated
and judged useful to society because they were valuable, that is, precious and
charged with mythical potential7 .
By way of summary of the pre-monetary stage as lexically expressed through
Greek words, three interrelated imagined frames must be mentioned: those of
exchange, myth and preciousness, out of which key concepts arise. Transactions
and exchanges occupy a wide spectrum of the individual’s activities, where spe-
cialized items are used as special-purpose money. A physical and metaphorical
concept of weight and balance dominates all manner of currency transactions.
Wealth, conceived as static, limited property, goods or needs, should not be
included in the exchange frame. Having no monetary equivalence, it rather
evokes the ideas of balance and preciousness, private storing and affairs to cover
one’s needs. Last, value is conceived of as preciousness, either as the beauty of
precious metals and ornaments or as symbols socially worth honouring, often
charged with mythical potential or pertaining to the realm of the sacred, with
religious or legendary implications.
Moving on to sixth and fifth century Greek, a much more complex imagined
scenario emerges, as suggested by the use of words at this juncture. From a
lexicographical point of view a conspicuous growing specialization of terms
prevails, defined both by the creation of new terms meaning either ‘money’ or
‘a coin’, and by the monetarized extensions of meaning of pre-existing ones.
That is, many of the words in the corpus follow a clear all-purpose money path.
As regards to new terms, argýrion, mna, statér and nómisma find their way
into the (monetary) lexicon. Argýrion, a derived word from árgyros denoting ‘a
coin’, and mna, a borrowing from Hebrew, indicating ‘sum of money’, imply
some kind of basic structural and semantic abstraction. Statér and nómisma, in
turn, belong to the category of deverbal nouns, that is, they are nouns coined as
results of activities implied in the exchange process and as such should be born
in mind. Statér stands for ‘a weight’, though it is also used as ‘the common name
for a coin of various metals’; and nómisma, still keeping some of its old senses
7. Basing his observations on the legends of The Tripod of the Seven Sages, The Ring
of Polycrates and The Golden Fleece, Gernett (1981:77) draws our attention to the
ancient meaning of ágalma and agállein, as value, implying both ‘to adorn’ and ‘to
honour’.
moves on to refer to ‘anything sanctioned by current use’, ‘custom’ and ‘legal

measure’, also used as ‘current coin’. The various meanings registered for both
these words offer insightful clues about the change occurred in the imagined
cognitive framework of exchange, as will be indicated below.
At the same time, the emergence through processes of metonymy and meta-
phor of new monetized meanings in árgyros, chalcós, drachmé, obelós, tálanton,
trápedsa and tókos is to be noted. In the sixth and fifth centuries bc, árgyros is
used as a short lived synonym of argýrion, chalcós as ‘copper money’, drachmé
as ‘a money’ or ‘a silver coin’, obelós as ‘a coin’, tókos as ‘yield’ – from a
previous meaning as “offspring” – and tálanton acquires a commercial nuance
“a commercial weight”. Trápedsa, a term originally used as a ‘dining table’
with mythical connotations, turns into the meaning of ‘bank’8 , and chréma
incorporates to this semantically-shifted group of words acquiring a new sense
of “merchandise”.
The significant presence of words indicating ‘coin’ as count nouns hints
at the fact that money had turned into mobile quantifiable units of exchange,
something which would undermine key pillars of Greek society, mainly tradi-
tional hierarchies. The concentration of wealth in standardized and exceedingly
mobile units allowed commoners an easy access to it. This new circumstance
would not only seriously modify the image of wealth and propriety in speakers’
minds, but, if Scheidel (2010: 286) is right, a new imagery frame of democ-
racy and the universal right to participate in common affairs would open up
before them, cognitively associated to the one now common for specialized
exchanges.
The shift to a new imagined frame of exchange in Classical Greece is ratified
by many other lexical changes having occurred at this period. First, it seems
that the prevailing ideas of weight and (customarily sanctioned) balance is be-
ing substituted by that of reliability; the need to avoid forgery through a legal
guarantee emerges, as evidenced by the nouns drachmé, nómisma and obelós.
From the sixth century bc onwards, drachmé as ‘a basic coin’ (and ‘weight’) is
understood as made of silver, that is, of a forgery-proof metal. This judgement
may also explain why électron as described in dictionaries does not entail the
meaning of ‘coin’ at this time9 . The need of having monetary tokens that would
8. Banking, though currently relevant, will not be considered here. Lexicographical data
are scarce and the term does not exhibit any abstract or institutional connotations
different from those observable in other individual kind of exchanges.
9. According to Kroll (2010: 17 ff) électron coins were short-lived. In fact, the term
stabilizes with the meaning of ‘pegs of a lire’, retaining thus its mythical and poetical
nuances.
be difficult to counterfeit forced électron out of the lexical net. The semantic
evolution of nómisma, in turn, further ratifies that reliability was no longer a
matter of mutual trust, a customary issue, private and societal, but a state and
legal one. Still maintaining its etymological sense of ‘anything sanctioned by
current use’ or ‘custom’, the use of nómisma significantly evolved into that of
‘legal measure’. Legality implies the external figure of an authenticating state,
issuing pre-weighed ingots or coins and sealing them with the authority of the
law. Coined as a deverbal noun, nómisma suggests that the main activity involved
in exchanges is no longer that of seizing or weighing, but that of legalizing. And
the use of nómisma as ‘current coin’, and of ‘pieces of money’ up to the fifth and
sixth century ad, implies that coins were now to be understood as ‘legal(ized)
coins’. Finally, the contention of reliability as a point in focus is lexically rein-
forced by the fact that obelós, a temporary label for ‘coin’metonymically derived
from the name of a non-precious metal, ends up meaning ‘false’, ‘inauthentic’
in later times.
During the sixth – fifth centuries bc a second idea emerges as pivotal for the
development of a new imagined frame of exchange situations. The concept of
profit is newly mirrored in the lexicon, as proved by the profusely debated word
tókos 10 . The metaphorical interpretation of ‘offspring’ as ‘yield’ explains the
conception of money in terms of living-beings, capable of creating or generating
richness. Money has turned into a powerful object menacing the older idea
of limit and balance. Hence, a new frame emerges, which might also clarify
some marginal occurrences of the terms statér and trápedsa. The sixth – fifth
century bc uses of the term statér as ‘debtor’ could be explained in connexion
with the idea of yield. Derived from a primary meaning of ‘weight’, a ‘debtor’
might evoke the idea of being a heavy load to society. Along a similar line, the
morally-charged use of trápedsa for ‘spendthrift’ or for one who ‘lives at others’
expenses’ feeds back the gradual transformation undergone by the imagined
frame of exchange. In fifth century bc Athens a new covetous individual has
emerged whose aspiration in life is to create more money while making money is
the right thing to do11 . The ancient belief in balanced and limited compensations
dependent on social rights and on the amount of effort required to obtain them
does not seem to apply any longer.
10. This word acquires particular relevance in Demosthenes thirty three “private
speeches”. Besides, evidence of the expression ‘creditor’s interest’is recorded in more
than 200 inscriptions. ig II (2), 146 B17 Delos, fourth century bc; sig6. 72.23,Delph.
11. As confirmed by the quote Chrémata anér or ‘Money makes the man’ (Pindar, Is.
2.11).
The two notions of reliability and profit might be said to be naturally related.
Unreliable money turned ill-suited for profit-making exchanges and, most im-
portant, inefficient. In more primitive stages, ingots or coins not only had to
be weighed, but often assayed visually, which hindered rapid, safe exchanges.
Besides, state legalized coinage allowed profit to be made by issuing a currency
with a value-added minting charge.
In this new linguistic and cognitive frame of exchange situations with its
established concept of profit, the idea of wealth also proves altered. A new
dynamic image of wealth arises. Not only is wealth understood as ‘merchandise’,
a matter of mobile drachmaı́ and obeloı́ 12 as acknowledged above, (Schaps 2010:
47), but as the result of enrichment or impoverishment processes, an image far
removed from that of propriety, stored precious goods. At least partly, wealth has
acquired a monetized, mercantile nuance. To this point it is to be remarked that
silver and gold as static stored wealth are gradually referred to through words
different to those used for wealth as mobile trading currency, as will be further
confirmed regarding the words chrysós and árgyros.
Unlike what was described for Homeric times, the emergent and increasingly
dominating cognitive scenario of exchange is no longer closely linked to that of
preciousness. From a lexical point of view, precious imagery does not seem to be
as directly evoked in monetized transactions: the words chrysós and électron are
expelled from the monetary system of coinage, though for different reasons13 ;
and árgyros, in turn, seems to exhibit its meaning as ‘coin’ only rarely, retaining
that of silver. As stated above, it is the word drachmé, an anatomical metaphor
implying size and thus unrelated to preciousness, that primarily evokes the idea
of silver, whereas tálanton, literally and originally ‘weight’, also implies ‘a
weight of gold and silver’. These results seem to indicate that precious metals
are no longer valuable because of their beauty, but because of their forgery-proof
nature. Further evidence is drawn from the fact that base-metal substances are
no longer central to the new all-purpose money system. Chalcós as ‘money’
ends up meaning ‘weight’ (second century ad); and ‘iron’ becomes the ordinary
meaning of obelós also in that century.
Having lost most of its links with the idea of preciousness and beauty, the con-
cept of value undergoes a gradual transformation. In former frames of exchange
commodities were useful because they were valuable, precious to society. Now
they are becoming valuable because they are useful. The new mobile, profit
12. It should be remembered that mna acts as a synonym of chréma, ‘sum of money’,
meant as ‘wealth’, ‘earnings’.
13. Gold was too dear for common payments and proved inefficient. The term chrysós
extends its use to mean ‘anything dear or precious’ in a non-economic sense.
creating, all-purpose money has proved simple, efficient and thus useful in a
growing number of specialized exchanging situations.
As expounded so far, the above-mentioned examples seem to confirm that
Classical Greece was actually pervaded by the idea of money counted out in
coins and that a new imagined situation had emerged, where objects originally
found useful for economic and non-economic purposes had gained growing
acceptability as mobile units for trading and profiting. However, considering
all data, the resulting framework is not so simple. Dictionary results suggest
that there was an alternative economic style, as evidenced by parallel uses of
the words analysed. These concurrent meanings might be identified at first sight
with remnant forms of an older system. But they could also be taken as evidence
of a transitional reality. The polysemous nature of Classical Greek terms might
be charting a time of monetary transition and overlap during which “an ancient
form of currency was being supplemented and gradually replaced by a newer
form”(Kroll 2010: 24).
In this sense, it is to be remarked that the idea of ‘weight’ is still strong in the
sixth century bc, considering the high number of lexical items which identify
‘weight’ and ‘money’, chalcós, drachmé, statér, mna, tálanton and obelós, as
opposed to those referring solely to money as coinage, namely, argýrion and
árgyros, both short-lived in that use. Moreover, the meaning of tálanton as
the ‘tax payed for the use of the balance’ suggests a stage where exchanged
items were not necessarily always pre-weighed or given a token value. What is
more, non-count meanings found in words such as mna and tálanton, defined as
‘weight, sum of money’ or chalcós ‘weight, copper money’ might be also taken
as evidence of money which was not quantifiable into units, that is, bullion
money, be it pre-weighed or not14 .
Some uses of the term statér may also fit this intermediate stage: its function
as a general label for ‘coins of various metals’ might imply that the new criterion
of reliability was not a required or salient feature in all situations. Something
similar might be concluded from the fact that the word chalcós, originally a
base metal, was also temporarily used to mean ‘coin’. These non-precious units
could be the ones added as fractional coins to supplement the bullion in local
use (Kroll 2010: 33).
All things considered, the presence of two co-existing monetized systems
might be reckoned for Classical Greece. Some highly metaphorized and pro-
14. According to Kroll (2010:33) “Weighed bullion was slow to disappear as a trans-
actional medium in the western Greek world”. And he adds in note: “the making
of payments in bullion and the hoarding of bullion with coins never disappeared
entirely”. (See also Harris 2010: 10, 13 and Schaps 2010).
gressively abstract senses of words would represent the emergence of a new

period when all-purpose money was used to perform a growing series of spe-
cialized, material exchanges: different kind of payments, trading, and storing
of transactionable wealth. Far from being definitely established and distinctly
lexicalized, these meanings co-existed with more primitive ones portraying eco-
nomic practices probably peripheral to those central more modern ones. The ex-
tent of monetization in sixth century bc society would probably be quite variable
according to social class and according to location (Harris 2010: 7, 11, Kroll
2010: 33). The various changes would affect different kinds of people differently
and at a different pace, something which is still to be researched in detail. More
conservative sectors of society would also be opposed to them for different rea-
sons, among which the menacing nature of democraticized money is not to be
disregarded. And the same would also apply to geographical fringes: it has been
suggested that in international trading centres, in unregulated spaces between
cities and presumably in cities that did not mint or had not passed the relevant
legislation, more primitive practices would be accepted (Kroll 2010: 34). Hence
the apparently chaotic net weaved from dictionary information and the tentative
introduction of new terms and word meanings which would eventually fail.
In order to complete the analysis of results, some non-monetized meanings
of the selected words must be highlighted. Dictionary details indicate that some
of the terms in the corpus evolved to a lesser metaphorical extent and remained
closest to their old uses; and trápedsa kept some of its religious connotations,
‘meats and offerings, table dedicated to the gods’15 . It seems that the previous
cognitive link between exchange and myth might barely be traced in community
and religious offerings, a now detached realm of social transactions, more spiri-
tual and symbolic, where the – non-monetized – terms árgyros, chrysós and
électron would also belong.
To summarize the second scenario found in Classical Greece, suffice it to say
that the coherent exchange frame inherited from Homeric times seems divided
into two. Exchange images pertain now to two different realms, as proved by
the polysemy and semantic development of monetary terms. On the one hand,
a new frame of specialized, commercial types of exchange is found, where
the concepts of efficiency, reliability, usefulness and all-purpose money prove
dominating and expanding. On the other, and increasingly opposed to it, that of
15. It proves noteworthy that trápedsa eventually lost these meanings, after the intro-
duction of trapédsi for ‘table’ and the selection of different terms for ‘altar’ in the
religious realm. It became then established as a central term of the modern economic
system, together with drachmé and tókos.
religious and social exchanges, for which special-money items are still needed,
and efficiency, simplicity and convenience do not apply.
However, it should be born in mind that in historical processes “outcomes
at a ‘critical juncture’ trigger feedback mechanisms . . . that reinforce the re-
currence of a particular pattern into the future”16 . Interestingly enough, though
the connexion between exchange, myth and beauty had been severely weakened
in the general imagined frame of exchange, it remains marginally visible in the
sacred images and other community-related symbols engraved into Greek coins,
as well as in the frequent reference to the art of coinage or to the beauty of Greek
coins found in texts, a kind of discourse difficult to explain otherwise (Scheidel
2010: 286).
4. Concluding remarks
The present contribution illustrates that a detailed analysis of linguistic issues

proves fruitful to abandon modern biases and reconstruct relevant dimensions of
ancient exchange practices. Linguistic research is also revealing as a mechanism
to explain the cognitive shading of a primitive system into an apparently new
one and to describe intermediate stages of both language and behaviour. The
polysemy and instability of word meanings in sixth century bc Greek suggests
a period of transition, before the new system becomes neatly consolidated.
The analysis of pertinent terms leads to the conclusion that the cultural change
undergone in Classical Greece is best analyzed by starting out from a general
imagined frame of exchange, which would initially embrace monetary and non-
monetary transactions, later seen as belonging to two separate realms.
The lexical and semantic comparison between eighth century and sixth cen-
tury bc economic terms and meanings confirms that two different imaginary
frames of interaction are to be reconstructed for either period.
The eighth century bc times prove to be dominated by a coherent frame of
exchange, embracing all manner of currency transactions. A basic network of
words reflects the existence of a limited set of items serving as special-purpose
money in a wide array of situations. Seizing and mainly weighing are lexi-
calized as common activities governing exchange, performed in the individual
sphere. The exchange imagery, controlled by balance and equilibrium, proves
16. See http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/puffert.path.dependence. The concept of self-

reinforcing path dependence, originally applied to economic allocations, seems close
to recent postulates in Historical and Cultural Linguistics. The idea that history mat-
ters and that choices made on the basis of transitory conditions can persist long after
those conditions change proves essential in explaining cultural processes.
ineluctably linked to that of myth and preciousness. Thus, value is conceived of

as preciousness. Commodities are useful to society because they are valuable,
precious or charged with mythical potential. Finally, the idea of wealth, domi-
nated by the concepts of ‘limit’, as ‘needs’ to be covered or ‘inherited property’,
is left out of the exchange frame, though it shares with its central elements the
idea of preciousness.
In Classical Greece, this coherent and general exchange frame shades into
two increasingly separate ones: a frame of material exchanges seems to be
opposed to that of spiritual or symbolic ones, which will become more and more
functionally restricted and lexically independent. These two frames develop at
a different pace, the second more closely reflecting the features inherited from
the ancient frame of general exchanges.
The imagery evoked by the new frame of material exchanges is mirrored
in the new terms and senses conspicuously created, showing a social and emo-
tional perception of money as distinct from other exchanging items. Money gets
mobile and countable and a new concept of profit emerges, substituting that of
balance and equilibrium. The ancient somewhat static system turns dynamic.
Material transactions become specialized, as governed by the idea of efficiency
and usefulness. Seizing and weighing as main activities become substituted by
that of legalizing, which prompts a different conception of precious metals:
from the idea of beauty to that of resistance to corrosion and counterfeiting.
Wealth becomes transactionable and thus included within this frame of trading
and material exchanges.
Lexical findings indicate that the new monetized system was not completed
in fifth century bc Greek. This period was, rather, a time of monetary transition
and overlap during which an ancient form of currency for material exchanges
was being supplemented and gradually replaced by a newer form of coinage
as full-purpose money. The change in language and behaviour would advance
more slowly in the so-called fringes of society, either social or geographical.
As the breach between the material and the symbolic frames of exchange
becomes wider, the closely knit link between value, myth and preciousness
universally valid for the pre-monetary stage, gets weaker, though it can still
be traced. On the one hand, it is maintained in the second imagined frame
of exchanges, that governing religious or social transactions, and in wealth
understood as the storage of precious goods. On the other, it gets its way into the
material frame of exchange through the engraving of divinity images on Greek
coins.
As the modern economic system grows stronger, drachmé, trápedsa and
tókos, will be established as unequivocal lexicalizations of a new monetary
arrangement.
In conclusion, metaphor and metonymy have been proved to play crucial roles
in providing the language with suitable terminology to capture and express the
transformations arising. However, this research has thrown up questions in need
of further investigation. A number of possible future studies using a Cognitive-
Cultural Linguistics approach is perceptible. More specifically, analyses made
at a textual and discursive level would be highly recommendable to strengthen
the results achieved in previous interdisciplinary projects.
References
Backhouse, Roger E.
2001 The Penguin history of Economics, London: Penguin.
Brinton, Laurel and Elizabeth Closs Traugott
2005 Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: University Press.
Cameron, Louise and G. Low (eds.)
1999 Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: University Press.
Chantraine, Pierre
1977 Dictionnaire Étymologique de la langue Grecque. Paris: Klincksieck.
Cohen, Edward E.
1992 Athenian Economy & Society, Princeton: University Press.
Davies, Glyn
2002 A history of money from ancient times to the present day, 3rd ed.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Fillmore, Charles J.
1985 Frames and the semantics of understanding. In Quaderni di Semantica,
6.2: 222–254.
Fill, Alwin and Peter Mühlhäusler (eds.)
2001 The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment.
London & New York: Continuum.
Fitrakis, Thegopoulos
1990 Elinikó lexicó. Athens: Armonia.
Gannon Martin J. (ed.)
2000 Cultural Metaphors: Readings, Research Translations, and Commen-
tary. Sage Publishing Press.
Gernet, Louis
1981 The Anthropology of Ancient Greece, (French original 1968), Balti-
more/London: Johns Hopkins University.
Goatly, Andrew
1997 The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge.
Harris William
2010 Trade and Barter in Ancient Greece. in http://community.
middlebury.edu/∼harris/Classics/EconomicsinGreece.html. Last ac-
cessed 25 june 2010.
Harris, William V.
2010 Introduction. In W.V.Harris ed. 1–11.
Harris, William V. (ed.)
2010 The monetary systems of the Greeks and Romans. Oxford UP.
Hesychius, Alexandrini
1965 (reimpr.) Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon. Amsterdam: Hakkert.
Hymes, Dell
1977 Foundations in Sociolinguistics, Philadelphia: University Pennsyl-
vania Press.
Holloway, R.R.
1978 La ricerca attuale sull’origine della moneta, Rivista Italiana Numis-
matica, 80, 7–14.
Ingham, Geoffrey K.
2004 The Nature of Money, Cambridge: University Press.
Johnson, Mark
1987 The body in the mind, Chicago: University Chicago.
Kirby, James T.
1997 Aristotle on Metaphor, American Journal Philology, 118, 517–55.
Kroll, John H.
2010 The Monetary Use of the Weighed Bullion in Archaic Greece. In Har-
ris, ed.: 12–37.
2003 (1980) Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
Le Rider, George
2001 La Naissance de la monnaie. Pratiques monétaires de l’orient ancien.
Paris.
Liddell, Henry G., R. Scott and H.S. Jones
1968 (1843) A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford University Press.
Liebert, Wolf Andreas,
2001 The Sociohistorical Dynamics of Language and Cognition. The Emer-
gence of the Metaphor Model “Money Is Water” in the Nineteenth
Century. In Fill & Mühlhäusler, eds. 101–108.
Mahon, James E.
1999 Getting your sources right. What Aristotle didn’t say. In L. Cameron
& G. Low, eds.: 69–80.
Palmer, Gary B.
2000 Lingüı́stica Cultural, Madrid, Alianza Editorial (Engl. Ed. 1996).
Pollux
1967 (reimpr.) Pollucis Onomasticon. Stuttgart: Teubner.
Ridgeway, William
1976 The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards, New York:
Attic Book Ltd.
Sapir, Edward
1921 Language, New York: Henry Holt.
Schaps, David, M.
2010 What was Money in Ancient Greece? In Harris, ed.: 38–48.
Schaps, David M.
2004 The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece.
Ann Arbor.
Scheidel, Walter
2010 “The Divergent Evolution of Coinage in Eastern and Western Eurasia”,
in Harris (2010), 267–286.
Seaford, Richard
2004 Money and the Early Greek Mind. Cambridge: University Press.
Stephanus
1954. (reimpr.) Thesaurus Graecae Linguae. Graz: Akademische Druck.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/puffert.path.dependence
http://economics.about.com/od/economicsglossary/g/pathdy.htm
http://www.utdallas.edu/∼liebowit/palgrave/palpd.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical institutionalism
Metaphor and economic thought: A historical
perspective
Nicolaas T.O. Mouton
Abstract
Ever since economists first began to inquire into the nature of what Adam Smith called
“the human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”, they have
resorted to metaphors to make sense of phenomena like markets and money. Rather often,
they borrowed ideas from the biological sciences of their time. If we track the evolution
of “economic biology” over time, it turns out that most extensions and elaborations of the
metaphor carry subtle but strong traces of their approximate historical provenance. More
generally, a historical perspective enables one to see the metaphors underlying economic
reasoning as flexible and dynamic processes, rather than as fixed and static systems.
1. Introduction
“Economic conditions are constantly changing,” observed Alfred Marshall at the

outset of Principles of Economics, “and each generation looks at its own prob-
lems in its own way.” (Marshall, 1920:1) This deceptively simple description of
the dismal science’s historicity, which hints at Marshall’s immersion in the intel-
lectual heritage of nineteenth century Germany1 , has numerous implications for
an inquiry into the nature of figurative economic thought. Most obviously, it in-
vites us to investigate whether – and if so, how and why – economists of different
eras looked at their own problems through their own metaphors. Less obviously,
the answers to those questions subvert suppositions about metaphor that all too
many contemporary theorists, all too easily, treat as corroborated truths. But
1. Marshall is occasionally portrayed as a persistent opponent of Historismus, yet he

was demonstrably influenced by at least two variants thereof. Firstly, he “openly
and repeatedly praised and supported many of the ideas and leaders of the German
historical school”, such as Knies and Roscher, and indeed “went to Germany to study
under the tutelage of members of the historical school” (Hodgson, 2005: 332, 333).
Secondly, he made a number of explicit and positive references to Hegel’s Philosophy
of History (see e.g. Marshall, 1920: 9).
50 Nicolaas T.O. Mouton
before I survey the specific issues at stake, before I submit my own standpoint,
before I show why it has a subversive slant, before I study an empirical case: let
us look at what Marshall himself had to say about metaphor.
2. Marshall on metaphor
The mere fact that Marshall had something to say about metaphor2 is inter-
esting in itself, for as Deirdre McCloskey found, “few economists recognize
the metaphorical saturation of economic theories believed to be literal” (Mc-
Closkey, 1998:40). Yet Marshall was acutely aware of economists’ reliance on
metaphorical reasoning, and addressed the theme astutely. Consider the chain
of contentions that culminated in his oft-quoted conclusion that “the Mecca of
the economist is economic biology” (Marshall, 1898:43). In order to find its
own way of looking at its own problems, Marshall argued, a new generation first
needs to wrestle free from the mental stranglehold of its ancestors’ metaphors.
More specifically, he insisted that one of the main challenges facing fin-de-siècle
economists was to overcome their predecessors’ dependence on inference pat-
terns imported from physics, and indicated that the best way to bring this about
would be to borrow from biology:
“It has been well said that analogies may help one into the saddle, but are encum-
brances on a long journey. It is well to know when to introduce them, it is even
better to know when to stop them off. Two things may resemble one another in their
initial stages; and a comparison of the two may then be helpful: but after a while
they diverge; and then the comparison begins to confuse and warp the judgment.
There is a fairly close analogy between the earlier stages of economic reasoning
and the devices of physical statics. But is there an equally serviceable analogy
between the later stages of economic reasoning and the methods of physical dy-
namics? I think not. I think that in the later stages of economics better analogies
are to be got from biology than from physics; and consequently, that economic
reasoning should start on methods analogous to those of physical statics, and
should gradually become more biological in tone” (Marshall, 1898:39).
Modern commentaries on Marshall’s “economic biology” tend to concentrate

on the evaluative facet of such formulations, which is most salient in statements
2. Although Marshall typically talked about “analogy” – and occasionally, “compari-

son” – rather than “metaphor”, it seems reasonable to redescribe his remarks about
analogy as reflections on metaphor. After all, Aristotle’s definition of metaphor por-
trayed it as closely related to analogy (Poetics 1457b6-7), and the idea that “metaphor
is like analogy” is still a respectable position (Gentner, Bowdle, Woff, and Boronat,
2001). At any rate, Marshall’s examples of “analogy” would qualify as clear-cut cases
of “metaphor” in most contemporary uses of the latter term.
like “better analogies are to be got from biology than from physics”.3 Typically,
the exegetes respond either with appraisals of whether this is indeed the case,
in principle, or with assessments of whether Marshall’s own attempt to develop
a biological perspective was successful, in practice.
3. Flexible processes versus fixed patterns
These questions are important, but they draw our attention away from a more
basic aspect of Marshall’s account, namely his assumptions about the very na-
ture of metaphorical reasoning. To see what I have in mind, consider again the
claim that “two things may resemble one another in their initial stages; and a
comparison of the two may then be helpful: but after a while they diverge; and
then the comparison begins to confuse and warp the judgment.” Clearly, the
underlying assumption is that scientific metaphors develop over time; that they
are best understood as processes. Indeed, the passage hints at two quite different
processes. Firstly, the claim that “two things may resemble one another in their
initial stages. . . but after a while they diverge” implies that the things being
compared – say, economies and organisms – often turn out to be persistently
evolving phenomena. Secondly, statements like “a comparison of the two may
then be helpful” shift the focus from the things being compared, to the process
of comparing them.
Now, it would not be difficult to find fault with the details of this depiction of
metaphor. The mere mention of “comparison”, for example, will undoubtedly
cause the odd critic to re-circulate a few calcified criticisms of “the compari-
son theory of metaphor”.4 Indeed, even proponents of the comparison theory
may object to aspects of Marshall’s version, such as the naı̈ve-realistic assump-
tion that it involves a comparison between things rather than thoughts (see e.g.
Fogelin, 1994:30).
Despite the potentially problematic aspects of Marshall’s account, however,
his general view that economic metaphors are best understood as processes is
still of considerable value – not least because it constitutes a coherent challenge
to the contemporary conviction that metaphors “should not be thought of as
3. Interpreting Marshall’s metaphors has developed into a minor industry. See e.g. Hodg-
son (1993, 2001), Limoges and Menard (1994), Thomas (1991).
4. As Fogelin (1994:23) once observed, it has “become almost mandatory for writers on
metaphor to begin by rejecting a similarity or comparativist account [of metaphor]”.
Fogelin (1988, 1994) offers a cogent defence. Critics include Black (1955), Beardsley
(1962), Searle (1993), and Tirrell (1991). Interestingly, Tirrell (1991:339–340) argues
that most critics of the comparison theory turn out to be closet comparativists.
processes”, but rather as “a fixed pattern of ontological correspondences across

domains” (Lakoff, 1993:210, emphasis added). In due course, I will consider
such contentions in more detail. Suffice it for now to say that while Lakoff’s
claim may be correct in the case of a limited class of highly conventionalized
metaphors, it is certainly not true about all metaphors. For example, if one ex-
amines the fossil record of the biological metaphor underneath “evolutionary
economics” – and that happens to be one of the things I intend to do in this arti-
cle – it soon becomes clear that we are dealing with a flexible process rather than
a fixed pattern. Moreover, if it turns out that the correspondences that constitute
the metaphor are not carved in neurological stone, so to speak, then surely we
should also scrutinize the suppositions that initially conferred credibility on the
claim. But before we take a closer look at the problems that Marshall’s perspec-
tive creates for contemporary cognitive theories of metaphor, let us first make
sure that we have a proper understanding of the process-oriented alternative
itself.
4. Marshall’s mindset in historical context
Given that Marshall was born in 1842 and began working on Principles of
Economics in 1881, it is not particularly surprising that he thought of metaphors
as processes – nor, for that matter, that he also “regarded economic life, in reality,
as process, and proper analysis as necessarily describing change” (Glassburner,
1955:577). After all, the notion of development was “omnipresent as an idea
or theme in nineteenth-century thought” (Nisbet, 2002:103).5 Regardless of
whether they were studying culture or capitalism, language or law, science or
society, nineteenth century scholars aimed to discover its underlying “laws of
motion”. The most extreme manifestation of this evolutionary mindset is found
in Herbert Spencer’s remark that, “Whether it be in the development of the Earth,
in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of
Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science,
Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive
differentiations, holds throughout” (Spencer, 1891:10). Given this disposition,
5. It would be more correct to say that it was omnipresent in the second half of the
nineteenth century. As late as 1850, one of Cuvier’s former students, then a profes-
sor at Harvard, still insisted that “time does not alter organized beings” (Agassiz,
1850:116, as quoted in Menand, 2002:106). Similarly, as Herbert Spencer correctly
noted, sociologists like Comte clung to “the dogma of the fixity of species” until
the end, which kept their “conceptions of individual and social change within limits
much too specific” (Spencer, 1873:329).
it is not surprising that once nineteenth century thinkers noticed that metaphor
“inheres in the man of science as well as in the artist or the poet, and it cannot
be suppressed” (Ward, 1897:258), they immediately directed their attention to
the question of how such metaphors evolve.6
In fin de siècle debates about the roles of metaphors in new sciences such
as sociology, for example, one often encounters comments like the following:
“It is remarkable how far it is possible to carry [the analogy between societies
and organisms] when a large number of acute minds are fixed upon it for a
considerable time” (Ward, 1902:484). The three distinct claims contained in
that comment – namely, that the relevant metaphor was continuously “carried
further”, that it was carried further by “a large number of acute minds”, and
that it took those acute minds “a considerable time” – add up to an account of
metaphor which leaves little reason to think that we will find any “fixed pattern
of correspondences”. Indeed, Ward pointed out that the “acute minds” of nine-
teenth century sociology’s “biological school” rarely agreed about mappings:
they vigorously competed to extend the metaphor in new directions, vehemently
contested the extensions proposed by others, and thereby kept the theory based
on the metaphor in constant motion.
Similarly, early twentieth century ruminations about the role of metaphor in
physics resulted in the idea that they are “an utterly essential part of theories” not
only in the context of discovery, but also in the subsequent development of those
theories (Campbell, 1920:129). The core of the position, as Mary Hesse put it,
was that a scientific theory is “not a static museum piece, but is always being
extended and modified to account for new phenomena”, and that this process
of expansion and correction is made possible by a continuous probing of those
aspects of the underlying analogy “about which we do not yet know whether
they are positive or negative analogies” (Hesse, 1966:4, 8, emphasis added).
The little qualifier “yet” does a lot of important work in this formulation, for
it signifies that we are dealing with a process in which the users of a metaphor
do not know, at any particular stage of its development, whether they are on the
right track, or where it may lead next.
Seen against this background, the developmental focus underlying Marshall’s
perspective on metaphor was not an isolated and idiosyncratic intuition, but
rather reflected – to borrow one of Foucault’s felicitous phrases – a type of
6. See Mouton (forthcoming) for a more elaborate discussion of nineteenth century

conceptions of how metaphors evolve. For present purposes, I will merely summarize
the most salient features of the most interesting contributions.
“historical a priori” that pervaded the intellectual culture of the period.7 And,
far from being an outdated set of opinions, there is still considerable strength in
the conceptual schemes that these thinkers tried to construct.
5. Is an era best known by the metaphors it keeps?
Admittedly, a few problems do become visible on closer inspection. Regarding

Marshall’s perspective, in particular, it is difficult to think of episodes in which
an entire generation of economists rejected the metaphors bequeathed upon
them, and then neatly replaced them with a different set of mappings, based
on a different source domain. At any rate, not even the evolution of Marshall’s
own thought fits the proposed pattern particularly well. Thus he admitted that
“biological conceptions are more complex than those of mechanics; a volume on
Foundations must therefore give a relatively large place to mechanical analogies;
and frequent use is made of the term ‘equilibrium’, which suggests something
of statical analogy” (1920:19).
This does not mean that biological metaphors were simply abandoned: they
emerged long before Marshall, endured long after him, and evolved all the time.
Yet they never became dominant in the sense of displacing physics as the primary
source of new ideas.8 Hence, even though it is tempting to treat Marshall’s theory
of metaphor as a template, it would be inadvisable to impose it on the history
of economic thought. For economic thought simply does not conform very
well to the familiar idea that “an era is best known by the metaphors it keeps”
(Landau, 1972:84) – at least not if this is taken to mean that generational shifts
are necessarily characterized by neat conversions to new source domains.
Yet there is a sense in which it is true that a generation of economists is
best known by the metaphors it keeps. To see that this is so, and in what sense,
7. As an aside, it is interesting to note that nineteenth century conceptions of language

in general – as opposed to metaphor in particular – were almost invariably framed
in evolutionary terms. Or as Nerlich (1989:106) puts it, “linguistics in the nine-
teenth century had been mainly diachronic.” More specifically, linguists as different
as Schleicher and Whitney, drawing upon disciplines as diverse as paleontology and
zoology, tried to use concepts such as “evolution” and “transformation” to make
sense of linguistic change, which they took to be the main topic of linguistics (Ner-
lich, 1989:102ff). Alas, Nerlich notes that, “after 1916, the date of the posthumous
publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course de Linguistique Generale, this per-
spective was changed and linguistics came to focus on the synchronic and systematic
aspects of language [. . . ] Linguistics became static again” (Nerlich, 1989:106).
8. Mirowski (1989) makes a convincing case that economics has long been dominated
by physics metaphors. For a critical response, see Walker (1991).
requires a shift in focus from the idea that different generations prefer different
source domains, to the fact that different generations understand and unpack
the same source domain in quite different ways. From this perspective, it soon
becomes clear that most extensions and elaborations of a metaphor carry subtle
but strong traces of their approximate historical provenance.
An examination of the evolution of biological metaphors in economic dis-
course, for example, quickly reveals that different generations apprehended and
augmented them quite differently. The easiest way to see this is to study eco-
nomic metaphors from historical epochs far removed from our own, such as the
ones found in medieval treatises like Nicholas Oresme’s De Moneta and early
modern tracts such as Bernardo Davanzati’s A Discourse upon Coins. I will
briefly discuss some of these texts later in this essay. For now, I wish to focus
on a stronger claim.
If we trace the historical trajectory of biological metaphors in economic
discourse over an extended period of time, we find many mappings that could
not have originated earlier or elsewhere than when and where they did in fact
originate. By way of illustration, consider the following claim, which I recently
encountered in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics: “Each of the ‘traits’
exhibited by contemporary stagflation could be traced back to underlying equiv-
alents of DNA structures and enzymes” (Foa, 1982:11).
One need not know much about the author or the context to see that this state-
ment could not possibly have been made by, say, eighteenth century physiocrats
like Quesnay, despite the fact that they made conspicuous use of biological
metaphors. After all, they knew nothing about “DNA structures and enzymes”.
For that matter, a notion like “stagflation” also belongs to our vocabulary, not
theirs. Moreover, it is obviously not merely a matter of “vocabulary”. That is,
the problem is not that they simply lacked words – or for that matter, concepts –
such as “DNA structures” or “stagflation”. Both notions are only intelligible
against the background of a vast accumulation of empirical discoveries, theo-
retical advances, and intellectual ruptures.
In short, the state of knowledge in a given era shapes the ways in which a
metaphor can be extended and elaborated. Interestingly, some nineteenth cen-
tury thinkers were quite aware of this, and commented upon it explicitly. For
example, Herbert Spencer realized that his construal of the social organism
metaphor was based on biological knowledge that was not available to its earlier
advocates, and that this yielded different sets of mappings: “In the absence of
physiological science, and especially of those comprehensive generalizations
which it has but lately reached, it was impossible to discern the real parallelisms
[between societies and organisms]” (Spencer, 1891:269). The key issue here is
not that scientific knowledge was more “advanced” in Spencer’s age than it was
in Aristotle’s, however, but simply that it was radically different. (If this sounds
like an exaggeration, you need but recall that Aristotle held the heart to be the
locus of thinking, and believed that the brain primarily served to cool down the
blood.9 ) The peculiar knowledge of a particular period, in turn, shaped the ways
in which the metaphor could be extended and elaborated.
6. On ahistorical mindsets and anachronistic methodologies
While all this may seem somewhat obvious, once one has become aware of
it, it rarely attracts attention, due to an ahistorical mindset that regularly yields
anachronistic remarks like the following: “The fundamental question in applying
the method of evolutionary biology to economics is that of determining the
economic equivalent of the gene” (Gilpin, 1996:412). This may well be true in
a late twentieth century context. The problem is that, even though an economist
like Thorstein Veblen was very much interested in “applying the method of
evolutionary biology to economics”, it could not possibly have occurred to him
to ask this supposedly “fundamental question” when he wrote his famous article,
“Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?” (Veblen, 1898). After all,
the article was published before De Vries and Correns rediscovered Mendel’s
writings. And an economist who knows nothing about the gene obviously cannot
search for its “economic equivalent”. Of course, Veblen continued to study
“the latest developments in evolutionary theory; it comes as no surprise to see
Mendelian genetics appear in Veblen’s work at about the same time Mendelism
won acceptance among biologists” (Eff, 1989:702). But in 1898, an enterprising
economist turning to biology for new ideas would not have found anything like
“Mendelian genetics” in the source domain, just waiting to be projected onto
the target domain. In short, we would do well to heed what Limoges and Menard
(1994:350), in their discussion of Marshall’s biological metaphors, rightly calls
a “crucial methodological rule”:
“In the history of any science, hindsight may prove at times illuminating, but it
is not permissible to account for a theoretical construct by later developments
of the sciences. This is why we must ignore what we now know about evolution
theory as it unfolded after Marshall’s time. Marshall’s work has to be understood
on its own terms, from the viewpoint of what he thought was known, of what he
read and commented on.” (Limoges and Menard, 1994:350)
9. See e.g. Parts of Animals, 652b26. Crivellato and Ribatti (2006) provide an overview
of Aristotle’s conception of human anatomy.
To insist on the importance of paying attention to when particular mappings

were first made, or why it would not have been possible to make them earlier,
would have seemed fairly obvious to nineteenth century scholars. But if one
happens to be influenced by contemporary theories of metaphor, it requires –
as Orwell once observed – a constant struggle to see what is in front of one’s
nose. For in this case, what is in front of one’s nose happens to be at odds with
the opinions of the two groups who have dominated most recent debates about
metaphor, namely analytic philosophers and cognitive linguists. As Ian Hacking
noted, analytic philosophers are “the very antithesis of historical sensibility”,
and their views of language and thought are neither synchronic nor diachronic,
but simply a-chronic (Hacking, 2002:51, 54).10 Their theories of metaphor, one
may add, are therefore also without any temporal dimension.
A similar lack of historical sensibility characterizes cognitive scientists’mus-
ings on metaphor.11 Indeed, many of the movement’s core convictions about what
metaphors are, how they work, and what work they do, are simply not compati-
ble with the type of perspective that Marshall proposed. As I already mentioned,
Lakoff explicitly decrees that metaphors consist of “fixed” and “static” cor-
respondence patterns (see e.g. Lakoff, 1993:210, 211, 245; Lakoff, 2006:11).
Elsewhere, Lakoff singles out the idea that “conceptual systems change through
time” and that they are therefore “historically contingent” as an assumption
that is common among continental philosophers but “at odds with” his own
theory (Lakoff, 1993:248–249). Similarly, Kövecses declares that metaphors
consist of “a static and highly conventionalized system of mappings” (Kövec-
ses, 2006:201, emphasis added).
There are both methodological- and theoretical reasons why this picture ap-
parently looks plausible to cognitive linguists. Shanon pin-pointed an important
methodological problem when he noted that “most cognitive studies are based on
artificially constructed metaphors. . . in these, fixedness may be artificially built
in, with much of the complexity of natural metaphors consequently eschewed”
(Shanon, 1992:662, emphasis added; see also e.g. Caballero, 2005:115). As for
theoretical factors, the belief that metaphors are fixed can be seen as a corollary
of one of the “key ideas of cognitive linguistics that clearly distinguishes the cog-
nitive linguistic conception of meaning from that of other cognitively-oriented
theories” (Kövecses, 2008:177), namely the so-called embodiment hypothesis.
There are numerous problems with the various versions of this idea, and I will
10. Apart from Hacking himself, the only exception that comes to mind is the late Richard
Rorty – see e.g. Rorty (1989:16ff).
11. There are exceptions on the edges of the cognitive linguistics community – see e.g.
the volume edited by Frank et al (2008).
return to some of them later in this article. For now, I merely wish to indicate the
logic that leads from embodiment to fixity. It is fairly simple: if the metaphors
we live by “arises from” the nature of our bodies, and if people have the same
bodies all over the world (Lakoff, 2006:13), then it follows that we will find the
same invariant sets of static mappings always and everywhere.12
Paradoxically, even Lakoff’s account of the emergence of novel mappings is
static: “lexical items that are conventional in the source domain are not always
conventional in the target domain. Instead, each source domain lexical item
may or may not make use of the static mapping pattern [. . . ] If not, the source
domain lexical item will not have a conventional sense in the target domain, but
may still be actively mapped in the case of novel metaphor” (Lakoff, 1993:210–
211; see also Lakoff and Johnson, 1980:52–53). Hopefully it will be obvious by
now why it is absurd to say that novel mappings simply activate the previously
unused parts of a pre-existing mapping pattern. To say that “genes” or “DNA
structures” were “unused parts of a pre-existing mapping pattern” until they were
“activated” in the twentieth century, for example, would obviously be nonsense.
Such notions were not “unused” in the nineteenth century: they did not exist at
all. Hence, they could not have been part of a “pre-existing mapping pattern”,
either. Should the problem still not be obvious, it will hopefully become clearer
once we take a closer look at an empirical case.
I will continue to focus on the history of biological metaphors, not least
because it is arguably still one of the best candidates for a “theory-constitutive
metaphor” (Boyd, 1993) in economics. Given the limited space available, I will
not even try to cover what Arthur Lovejoy called the “total life-history of an indi-
vidual idea”, under which he included all “the different facets which it exhibits,
its interplay, conflicts, and alliances with other ideas, and the diverse human
reactions to it” (Lovejoy, 1948:9). For present purposes, a few sketches of strate-
gically selected episodes from the metaphor’s long history will have to suffice.
7. Medieval conceptions of money
To begin with, consider the economic metaphors conjured by medieval- and

early modern thinkers like Oresme and Davanzati. Admittedly, they wrote be-
12. Coming from a slightly different angle, the anthropologist James Howe recently
noted that while especially Lakoff and Johnson’s early texts occasionally referred to
cultural variation, all the explanatory work in their approach is done by the idea that
metaphors somehow emerge from our bodies, which raises “the obvious question of
how one explains a variable by a constant” (Howe, 2008:16). See also e.g. Caballero
(2005:110).
fore “the economy” and “economics” came to be seen as, respectively, a clearly
differentiated sphere of society and a distinct specialism of science. Yet this did
not prevent them from reflecting on economic issues. Typically, they conceptu-
alized the economy as part of a larger “social organism”, and then made a series
of more specific mappings – say, between money and blood – in order to show
how specific economic organs fit into the social body. But their beliefs about
bodies were rather different from ours, and so were the inferences sanctioned by
their understanding of the source domain. The following passage should serve
to make the point:
“The state or kingdom, then, is like a human body and so Aristotle will have it in
Book V of the Politics.13 As, therefore, the body is disordered when the Humours
flow too freely into one member of it, so that that member is often thus inflamed
and overgrown while the others are whithered and shrunken and the body’s due
proportions are destroyed and its life shortened; so also is a commonwealth or
kingdom when riches are unduly attracted by one part of it. For a commonwealth
or kingdom whose princes, as compared with their subjects, increase beyond
measure in wealth, power, and position, is as it were a monster, like a man whose
head is so large and heavy that the rest of his body is too weak to support it.
And just as such a man has no pleasure in life and cannot live long, neither can
a kingdom survive whose prince draws to himself riches in excess” (Oresme,
1956:43–44, emphasis added).
Obviously, Oresme’s understanding of the source domain was shaped by the
ancient doctrine of “humorism”, which dominated medical thinking well into
the early modern period due to Galen’s enormous influence. The gist of the
theory was that the body contains four “humors”: blood, black bile, yellow bile,
and phlegm. An individual’s health, the theory went, required that the humors
remain in a state of balance. When the quantity of any of the four humors became
excessive or deficient, sickness resulted. Given this belief, treatment became a
matter of restoring balance, through practices such as bloodletting.
It is this set of inference patterns, embedded in this particular conception of
the source domain, which Oresme projected onto the target domain. It is difficult
to see how his construal of the metaphor could have emerged from the nature
of the body itself, or from bodily experience. After all, actual bodies do not
contain things like “black bile” that can cause disproportionate growth when it
flows too freely into specific parts of the body. And one cannot have a “bodily
experience” of something that does not actually form part of one’s body. Rather,
the metaphor was shaped by the science of the time.
13. The reference is presumably to Politics, 1302b–1303a

8. On “mechanistic physiology” and physiocrats
Biological metaphors proved to be as attractive to seventeenth century mercan-

tilists and eighteenth century physiocrats as they had been to medieval- and
early modern thinkers. Indeed, Christensen makes a strong case that:
“physiology played a crucially important role in shaping the early development

of the classical model [in economics]. . . From Hobbes to Quesnay, the dominant
set of metaphors shaping the conceptual structure of the economic theory of
production and exchange were drawn from physiology and the comparison of
the economy to the living body (and the larger economy of nature)” (Christensen
1994:249).
Since the multiple meanings of “physiology” may cause misunderstanding, let

me emphasize right away that Christensen’s claim does not support Lakoff’s con-
tention that conceptual metaphors are “motivated by our physiology” (Lakoff,
1987:407). When Christensen says that “physiology played a crucially important
role in shaping the early development of [economics]”, he is not talking about
“our physiology”, in itself: he is talking about the science dedicated to studying it.
More specifically, he is talking about the scientific physiology of a specific
time. In this case, we are dealing with the “mechanistic physiology” proposed
by men like Borelli and Boerhave. Thinkers like Quesnay – who was a surgeon
before he became interested in economics – then used the physiologists’ ideas to
construct a double metaphor, so to speak, in which the economy was conceptual-
ized as a body, and the body as a hydraulic machine. In short, the “body” that we
find in eighteenth century economic thought was radically different from the pre-
Harveyan “body” that shaped the metaphors of medieval thinkers like Oresme.
Cognitive linguists constantly conflate such distinctions. For example,
Lakoff’s above-quoted announcement that metaphors somehow emerges directly
from our physiology itself is preceded, in the very same paragraph, by the asser-
tion that the metaphor in question is motivated by the fact that “ordinary speakers
of English by the millions have had a very subtle insight into their own phys-
iology” (1987:407, emphasis added). Yet there is a rather important difference
between saying that a metaphor somehow emerges directly from our physiology
itself, and saying that it is motivated by our insights into our own physiology.
In fact, we are dealing with two radically different theories, with radically dif-
ferent consequences for our understanding of metaphor. Crucially, if metaphors
are motivated by “our physiology itself”, they are likely to be fixed, since our
physiology is fairly fixed. But if they are motivated by “our insights into our
own physiology”, then they are bound to be flexible. After all, over the course
of the last two millennia, the study of human physiology has yielded “insights”
that were occasionally true, often false, and constantly changing: one need but
compare Hippocrates’ hunches and Harvey’s hypotheses, or Paracelsus’ presup-
positions and Avicenna’s assumptions.
The result, as Bernard Cohen (1994:58) noted in a brief discussion of bio-
logical metaphors in the social sciences, is that “this metaphor has successively
illustrated the changes in physiology and medicine, being Galenic until the sev-
enteenth century, then Harveyan, and so on”.
9. The evolution of early evolutionary economics
Under Cohen’s casual category of “and so on”, we may include the radical
changes that occurred in just about all branches of biology during the nineteenth
century, which in turn reverberated through all the social sciences. As I briefly
indicated earlier, nineteenth century social scientists were quite aware of the
fact that the ideas they were borrowing from biology enabled them to think
thoughts that could not conceivably have occurred to earlier organicists. As
Herbert Spencer (1891:269) put it:
“A perception that there exists some analogy between the body politic and a
living individual body, was early reached; and has from time to time re-appeared
in literature. But this perception was necessarily vague and more or less fanciful.
In the absence of physiological science, and especially of those comprehensive
generalizations which it has but lately reached, it was impossible to discern the
real parallelisms.” (Spencer 1891:269)
One may well question whether the “parallelisms” that Spencer perceived were
in fact “real”, or for that matter what it means to say that a parallelism is “real”,
to begin with. What is undeniably true, however, is that during the nineteenth
century, the rapid developments in scientific fields such as physiology and em-
bryology – indeed, in every branch of biology – enabled men like Spencer to
make mappings between the two domains that could not possibly have been
made a mere century or so earlier.
I deliberately use Spencer to exemplify the point because his construal of the
analogy between societies and organisms had a strong influence on the thought
of both Alfred Marshall and Thorstein Veblen – the two founding fathers of what
is now known as “evolutionary economics”.14 For example, Marshall explicitly
14. Admittedly, earlier economists also made moves in an evolutionary direction. Thus
Veblen himself acknowledged that the members of the German Historical School
“have attempted an account of developmental sequence”. But he immediately added
that “they have followed the lines of pre-Darwinian speculations on development
rather than lines which modern science would recognize as evolutionary. They have
mentioned that Spencer had at least as great an influence on his thought as

anyone else:
The notion of continuity with regard to development is common to all modern
schools of economic thought, whether the chief influences acting on them are
those of biology, as represented by the writings of Herbert Spencer; or of history
and philosophy, as represented by Hegel’s Philosophy of History [. . . ] These two
kinds of influences have affected, more than any other, the substance of the views
expressed in the present book” (Marshall, 1920:9).
This was not unusual, at all: many of Marshall’s contemporaries also viewed “the
writings of Herbert Spencer [as] even more significant than those of Darwin”
(Thomas, 1991:3). This does not mean that one has to go as far as Robert Nisbet,
who somewhat sarcastically observed that “it is often said, by those unfamiliar
with the history of ideas, that the social evolutionists of the nineteenth century
were applying to institutions the idea of biological evolution formulated by Dar-
win . . . no such dependence is, in fact, to be found” (Nisbet, 1970:356–357).
There certainly are traces of Darwin in both Marshall and Veblen, and I will point
some of them out along the way. But while Darwin’s ideas surely need no intro-
duction, the situation is different when it comes to Spencer. If we posed Parsons’
famous “Who now reads Spencer?” question today, the answer would probably
still be “Hardly anyone”. Yet we cannot understand “evolutionary economics”,
as it was understood by its founding fathers, unless we have a reasonable grasp
of Spencer’s basic ideas. Let us take a brief look. I will take my point of depar-
ture in some of Spencer’s specific ideas about the evolution of the economy – or
what he called “Manufactures” and “Commerce” (1891:10) – since this might
make it easier to understand his influence on economists like Marshall.
10. Spencer on the evolution of money, in particular, and of the

economy, in general
Among the plethora of specific “parallelisms” between societies and organisms

that Spencer postulated, we find one that may seem quite similar, at first, to the
supposed similarity between blood and money that earlier economists proposed.
Crediting Liebig with the discovery that “silver and gold have to perform in the
given a narrative survey of phenomena, not a genetic account of an unfolding process”

(1898:388–389). Incidentally, note that Veblen used the plural form both when he
referred to “lines of pre-Darwinian speculations”, and when he referred to “lines
which modern science would recognize as evolutionary” – a clear recognition of the
multiplicity of models that were available for metaphorical projection by the end of
the nineteenth century.
organism of the state, the same function as the blood-corpuscles in the human
organism”, Spencer immediately corrected his predecessor by contending that
“Liebig has omitted the significant circumstance that only at a certain stage
of organization does this element of the circulation make its appearance . . .
Throughout extensive divisions of the lower animals, the blood contains no
corpuscles; and in societies of low civilization, there is no money” (Spencer,
1891:293,294).
Spencer’s immensely elaborate version of the mapping, of which I only
quoted a small part, differs from the versions postulated by his predecessors
in various respects. Most importantly, he observes that money does not feature
in primitive societies; hence, it does not make sense to posit a correspondence
between blood corpuscles and money in such cases. He solves the problem by
resorting to the idea that different types of societies correspond to different types
of organisms, where a “type” is defined in terms of its place in an evolutionary
sequence. Thus primitive societies correspond to simple organisms, and mod-
ern societies correspond to more complex ones. The lack of money in primitive
societies is analogous to the lack of blood in simple organisms. But in Spencer’s
scheme of things, both societies and organisms evolve, and in relatively ad-
vanced societies, as in relatively complex organisms, a blood circulation system
gradually takes shape.
Exactly the same pattern of reasoning characterizes his even more elaborate
discussion of the analogies between the evolution of “the economical division of
labor” in society and “the physiological division of labor” in organisms (Spencer,
1891:283:ff). Indeed, we find the same pattern in just about all the “parallelisms”
that he proposed. And this line of metaphorical reasoning became as charac-
teristic of nineteenth-century thinkers as it was uncharacteristic of medieval
philosophers, whose biological metaphors invariably portrayed static images of
immobile societies. The reason, of course, is that Spencer constantly relied on
various types of scientific knowledge – inter alia, about blood circulation sys-
tems, or the lack thereof, in different organisms – that were simply not available
to earlier proponents of the metaphor. Moreover, all his specific mappings were
embedded within a distinctively nineteenth century conception of “evolution”.
To understand that conception, one has to look underneath his incredibly
detailed digressions on how small organisms, like small societies, gradually
evolve into bigger ones; how structureless organisms, like structureless societies,
gradually develop more complex structures; how organisms characterized by
almost no interdependence due to an absence of physiological specialization,
like primitive societies without any notable division of labor, gradually develop
an increasing division of labor and hence a greater degree of interdependence.
Underneath all the detail, we find a single idea which Spencer extracted from
Karl Ernst von Baer’s theory of embryonic evolvement15 , and then projected
onto phenomena as different as the descent of a species and the development of
a society.
Every case, he argued, involves “the advance from the simple to the complex,
through a process of successive differentiations” (Spencer, 1891:35, emphasis
added). And time and again, he adds that, since the differentiated parts became
ever more dependent on one another, a theory “which ascribes the develop-
mental progress to differentiations alone, is incomplete. Adequately to express
the facts, we must say that the transition from the homogeneous to the het-
erogeneous is carried on by differentiations and accompanying integrations”
(Spencer, 1891:70–71, emphasis added).
11. How Spencer shaped Marshall’s metaphors
This conception of evolution appears, almost unaltered, in the work of economists

like Marshall. Thus we find the latter arguing that, among the “many profound
analogies” between industrial organizations and living organisms, the most basic
is simply that there is
“a fundamental unity of action between the laws of nature in the physical and in the
moral world. This central unity is set forth in the general rule, to which there are
not very many exceptions, that the development of the organism, whether social
or physical, involves an increasing subdivision of functions between its separate
parts on the one hand, and on the other a more intimate connection between them.
Each part gets to be less and less self-sufficient, to depend for its wellbeing more
and more on other parts, so that any disorder in any part of a highly-developed
organism will affect other parts also.” (Marshall, 1920: IV.VIII.2)
This formulation has Spencer’s fingerprints all over them, but should they still
be difficult to detect, consider how Marshall further unpacked the idea:
15. More specifically, Spencer borrowed from Huxley’s (1853) translation of parts of
von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) (Bowler, 1975:100). It
yielded a quite novel concept of evolution because, as Mandelbaum (1957:358) noted,
18th -century embryology was dominated by “preformationism”, according to which
the complete organism is already “preformed” in the sperm, and merely grows in size.
The epigenetic doctrine, according to which organisms develop by the successive
differentiation of the fertilized ovum, only displaced it in the nineteenth century,
when Wolff and Baer managed to account for the problem of how the differentiation
of parts took place. In the process, they also unintentionally supplied the conceptual
tools that Spencer needed to establish an epigenetic view of social evolution, in which
differentiation became a key concept.
“This increased subdivision of functions, or ‘differentiation’, as it is called, man-

ifests itself with regard to industry in such forms as the division of labour, and the
development of specialized skill, knowledge and machinery: while ‘integration’,
that is, a growing intimacy and firmness of the connections between the separate
parts of the industrial organism, shows itself in such forms as the increase of
security of commercial credit, and of the means and habits of communication by
sea and road, by railway and telegraph, by post and printing-press.” (Marshall,
IV.VIII.2–3)
Such passages provide some support for the interpretation of Marshall’s

metaphors proposed by Limoges and Menard (1994:337), namely “(1) that the
biological analogies at work in the Principles were carefully selected in relation
to the notion of the division of labor; (2) that reading Adam Smith through
the glasses of Darwin and his re-interpretation of Milne-Edwards, Marshall
significantly reshaped this notion and firmly embedded it into his concept of
organization; and (3) that this is crucial for understanding the logic of the Prin-
ciples and the production of such other key concepts as returns, economies of
scale, and internal and external economies”.
Obviously I do not agree with Limoges and Menard’s emphasis on Darwin:
Marshall read Adam Smith not – or at any rate, not only – through Darwin’s
glasses, but also through Spencer’s spectacles. Hopefully this point does not
need much further elaboration, by now. Suffice it to say that while Limoges and
Menard were not completely blind to Spencer’s influence on Marshall, they tried
very hard indeed to explain it away – probably because they deemed a Darwinian
genealogy as more respectable. I also disagree with their claim that all Marshall’s
biological analogies were selected in relation to the division of labor: Marshall’s
metaphors did partly serve to re-conceptualize specific concepts like “division
of labor”, but they also served a number of broader purposes.
Put differently, while Limoges and Menard insist that it would be wrong to
read Marshall as “a by-product of Spencer” with an emphasis on “very global
problems” like evolution, time, and irreversibility, it is hard to see how one can
avoid exactly such a reading without being quite unfaithful to Marshall’s texts.
Indeed, it seems to me that Marshall’s main motive for turning to biology indeed
involved a “very global problem”: namely, a perceived need to develop a more
dynamic form of economics that could cope with the kind of rapid changes in
the economy that we now lump together under labels such as “The Industrial
Revolution”.
As Marshall noted, the economic models that an earlier generation of
economists adhered to were inspired by early nineteenth century physics, and
they were not capable of conceptualizing change: “At the beginning of last cen-
tury, the mathematico-physical group of sciences were in the ascendant; and
these sciences, widely as they differ from one another, have this point in com-
mon, that their subject-matter is constant and unchanged in all countries and in
all ages” (Marshall, 1920, App.B.29, emphasis added). The problem, Marshall
insisted, was that the subject-matter of economics was simply not like that –
indeed, it was getting less and less like that. As he put it: “economics, like biol-
ogy, deals with a matter, of which the inner nature and constitution, as well as
the outer form, are constantly changing” (Marshall, 1920, App.C.6). Elsewhere,
he expressed the idea that there should be a fit between economic reality and
economic science with the help of the following metaphor:
“But biology itself teaches us that the vertebrate organisms are the most highly
developed. The modern economic organism is vertebrate; and the science which
deals with it should not be invertebrate. It should have that delicacy and sensi-
tiveness of touch which are required for enabling it to adapt itself closely to the
real phenomena of the world; but none the less must it have a firm backbone of
careful reasoning and analysis.” (Marshall, 1920: App. B. 46)
In short, Marshall’s main challenge was to construct a conceptual framework

that would be capable of capturing an economy in motion, and given that he
was born in 1842 – roughly a generation after Darwin (1809) and Spencer
(1820) – it is not surprising that he turned to biology. After all, the conceptions
of evolution that emerged in that discipline was surely the nineteenth century’s
most exciting source of ideas about change. Contrary to Limoges and Menard,
I would thus argue that the biological analogies at work in the Principles were
primarily selected in relation to the broad notion of change rather than more
specific ones like division of labor. The more specific notions were embedded
within the broader evolutionary framework.
Marshall also used biological metaphors to address a variety of other prob-
lems that I shall call, for lack of a better term, “meta-theoretical”. Consider
the so-called problem of historical specificity. That classic conundrum “starts
from the supposition that different socio-economic phenomena require theories
that are in some respects different from each other. An adequate theory of (say)
the feudal system will differ from an adequate theory of (say) capitalism [. . . ]
Variances between different systems could be so important that the theories and
concepts used to analyze them must also be substantially different” (Hodgson,
2002:93).
This problem preoccupied schools as diverse as German historical economics
and American institutional economics, and perplexed individuals as different as
Marx and Marshall. If we look at how Marshall tried to address the problem,
we again find biological metaphors. Framing the problem, Marshall noted that
“those propositions which are the most important in one stage of economic de-
velopment, are not unlikely to be among the least important in another, if indeed
they apply at all” (II.I.4). On Marshall’s view, this insight stemmed from “the
biological group of sciences”, which during the course of the nineteenth century
gradually learned that “if the subject-matter of a science passes through different
stages of development, the laws which apply to one stage will seldom apply with-
out modification to others; the laws of the science must have a development cor-
responding to that of the things of which they treat” (Marshall, 1920, App.B.29).
Whether this was indeed a lesson that nineteenth century biologists would
have recognized as one they taught is debatable. Spencer surely did not say that
different laws apply during different stages of development: on the contrary, he
insisted that a single law of differentiation drove the entire process. Similarly,
Darwin surely did not say that natural selection only applies in specific stages of
evolution. But the important point here is maybe not whether Marshall under-
stood the biology of his day correctly, but rather that his metaphors were shaped
by the biology of his day as he understood it. To this one may add that, even if
his conclusion was false with regards to the biological domain, it does not mean
that it was false in the social domain (cf. Searle, 1993:92–93).
Finally, Marshall also used biological metaphors to suggest a “life-cycle”
theory of firms. The following passage is probably one of the most frequently
quoted sections in the entire Principles:
“But here we may read a lesson from the young trees of the forest as they struggle
upwards through the benumbing shade of their older rivals. Many succumb on
the way, and a few only survive; those few become stronger with every year, they
get a larger share of light and air with every increase of their height, and at last
in their turn they tower above their neighbors, and seem as though they would
grow on forever, and for ever become stronger as they grow. But they do not. One
tree will last longer in full vigor and attain a greater size than another; but sooner
or later age tells on them all. Though the taller ones have a better access to light
and air than their rivals, they gradually lose vitality; and one after another they
give place to others, which, though of less material strength, have on their side
the vigor of youth. And as with the growth of trees, so was it with the growth of
businesses as a general rule before the great recent16 development of vast joint-
stock companies, which often stagnate, but do not readily die” (Marshall, 1920:
IV.XIII.4–5, emphasis added).
The last sentence is especially interesting, since it contains a subtle correction of

the way in which Marshall elaborated the metaphor in earlier versions of the text.
In the earliest editions of the Principles, for example, he similarly suggested
16. It is not clear to me why Marshall deemed this a “recent” development. To cite one
British example, the Levant Company was founded, in 1581, as a joint-stock company
(Willan, 1955:399).
that “as with the growth of trees, so it is with the growth of businesses”. But then
he continued to argue that “as each kind of tree has its normal life, in which it
attains a normal height, so the length of life during which a business of any kind
is likely to retain full vigor is limited by the laws of nature combined with the
circumstances of place and time, and the character and stage of development of
the particular trade in which it lies”.
In turn, this correction is interesting for at least two reasons. Firstly, the
different conclusion that Marshall presented in later editions of the text, namely
that some organizations “do not readily die”, was clearly forced by changes in
the target domain – to wit, “the great recent development of vast joint-stock
companies”. This serves to highlight that the target domain often plays a much
more active role in the construal of a metaphor than most contemporary theories
of metaphor imply.
Secondly, it offers an example of Marshall’s earlier-quoted remark that “two
things may resemble one another in their initial stages; and a comparison of the
two may then be helpful: but after a while they diverge; and then the comparison
begins to confuse and warp the judgment”. One may add that this particular
divergence – i.e. the evolution of a new type of organization that, unlike an
organism, does not necessarily die – happens to create considerable difficulties
for any attempt to import models from biology in a systematic fashion (Mouton,
2010). The problem is especially severe if one aims to import Darwinian models,
given the crucial role of mortality rates in that framework. Hence, it is hard to
see how one can apply such a model to a domain in which the entities “do not
readily die”. Or as Mirowski (1983:764) noted in a critical review of a recent
version of evolutionary economics: “If death is only a remote possibility, then
the selection metaphor has been stripped of what little analytical substance it
still retained in their models”.
12. The fall and rise of evolutionary economics
The divergences that Marshall detected anticipated a growing realization among

his early adherents that the biological metaphor was likely to “confuse and
warp the judgment”. For example, in 1914 Chapman and Ashton still warmly
embraced the life-cycle theory of how firms develop: they argued that “the
growth of a business and the volume and form which it ultimately assumes are
apparently determined in somewhat the same fashion as the development of an
organism in the animal or vegetable world” (Chapman and Ashton, 1914:512,
as quoted in Penrose, 1952:805), and elaborated the analogy considerably. Yet
by 1926, Ashton had second thoughts:
“The picture of the growth of an industry outlined here recalls a well-known

passage in which Dr. Marshall compared business undertakings with the trees of
the forest; and other biological analogies spring so readily to mind that it may be
more useful to point out the differences, rather than the similarities, between the
life-history of businesses and that of plants, or animals, or men. Businesses are
by no means always small at birth; many are born of complete or almost complete
stature. In their growth they obey no one law. A few apparently undergo a steady
expansion. . . With others, increase in size takes place by a sudden leap” (Ashton,
1926:572, as quoted in Penrose, 1952:805).
This tendency to focus on the differences between the source- and target domains
of a metaphor, as I have argued at length elsewhere (Mouton 2010), can be
seen as part of a style of metaphorical reasoning that emerged in 17-century
debates about the proper use of metaphors in science. Most of the time, the
result is not a total rejection of the metaphor, but rather a subtle correction. In
this particular case, however, it seems to have triggered severe skepticism. As
Hodgson (1999:88) puts it:
“Overall, the biological metaphor was widely invoked in economics and social
science as a whole in the 1890–1914 period. Yet this fashion did not last. On the
contrary, biological ideas faced an extreme reaction in the social sciences. By the
end of the 1920s the use of biological and evolutionary analogies had fallen out
of favor in economics and elsewhere.” (Hodgson 1999:88)
Yet in the 1950s, a few economists began to appeal to biology yet again (e.g.
Boulding, 1950; Alchian, 1950), and today, a number of economic schools resort
to biological metaphors without reservation. As one of the main figures in the
contemporary version of “evolutionary economics” proposed: “evolutionary
concepts (in a broad sense at least) and evolutionary language (at least since
Darwin) are the natural vehicles for analyzing economic dynamics” (Nelson,
2002:139).17 Similarly, biological metaphors feature quite prominently not only
in the “old institutionalism” associated with Veblen and his followers, but also
in the “new institutionalism” of scholars like Douglass North. In both cases,
the original focus on the evolution of the institutions within which economic
activity is embedded has been extended and elaborated by drawing on more
17. The reference to Darwin is somewhat misleading, because as Nelson and Winter
admitted when they first re-introduced evolutionary economics: “our theory is un-
abashedly Lamarckian: it contemplates both the ‘inheritance’of acquired characteris-
tics and the timely appearance of variation under the stimulation of adversity” (Nelson
and Winter, 1982:11). Yet the theory is not purely “Lamarckian” either. For example,
Nelson has appealed openly to Eldredge and Gould’s conception of evolution: “The
foregoing analysis suggests that, like species, the pattern of evolution of technology
linked institutional forms often is that of punctuated equilibrium” (Nelson, 1995:80).
recent developments within biology itself, such as Eldredge and Gould’s notion
of “punctuated equilibrium” (see e.g. Denzau and North, 1994:14,23–25).
13. Teaching an old metaphor the latest tricks
In just about any of these recent efforts to push the evolutionary perspective
in new directions, one encounters novel mappings that could not have emerged
earlier or elsewhere. Consider the following effort to extend and elaborate on
Marshall’s metaphor, which can be seen as an extreme case that – exactly because
it is extreme – highlights certain mechanisms that are so common that they tend
to be hard to detect. Published in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, it
has a telling title: “Marshall revisited in the Age of DNA” (Foa, 1982). The first
step in Foa’s argument is to note that the foundations of modern biology
“were independently laid, in [Marshall’s] lifetime, by Darwin and Mendel. Fol-
lowing the rediscovery (circa 1900) of the latter’s work (with which Marshall be-
came acquainted), the inherited traits of organisms were linked to entities called
‘genes’, located within the chromosomes of cells. Yet at the time of Marshall’s
death (1924), and for another quarter of a century, genes remained ‘hypothetical
units’ (Beadle, 1981)” (Foa, 1982:5–6).
Foa’s main point is so simple that it would be easy to overlook: biology has
changed considerably since Marshall published the first version of Principles
of Economics in 1890, and this open up new possibilities for extending the
metaphor in different directions:
“Pending the possible discovery of meaningful economic models of near-
biological specificity endowed with predictive value, one can draw a number
of analogies – lamentably superficial, for the time being – suggested by the ‘op-
tics’of molecular biology. One wonders what, if anything at all, the great Marshall
would have made of such conjectures” (Foa, 1982:11).
Given that Marshall died in 1924 – before the emergence of molecular biology,
before the establishment of the modern evolutionary synthesis, before Watson
and Crick – it seems fair to say that even though we obviously cannot ask him
“what, if anything” he made of Foa’s conjectures, we can safely assume that
he would not have understood the proposed mappings in a passage like the
following:
“A quasi-biological approach would probably require the breaking down of
macroscopic aggregates such as consumer expenditure, investment, etc., in
smaller and more manageable pieces exhibiting not only psychological (i.e., pref-
erences and expectations) but also structural features, sequences, and mutual in-
fluences. For instance, each of the ‘traits’ exhibited by contemporary stagflation
could be traced back to underlying equivalents of DNA structures and enzymes.

The significance of the analogy with genetics would flow from the observations
that, not unlike genes, the determinants of the go-stop process of mature capi-
talistic economics maintain their identity both in their latent and active states,
combine, but ‘merge’ only in pretty extreme cases” (Foa, 1982:11).
Despite the fact that Marshall had a body, a brain, and bodily experiences that
were presumably much like yours or mine, this would not in itself have enabled
him to make sense of the claim that “each of the ‘traits’ exhibited by con-
temporary stagflation could be traced back to underlying equivalents of DNA
structures”. First, he would have had to catch up with a series of scientific dis-
coveries about the biological domain. He would also have had to ask a colleague
what “stagflation” is. Only then would he have been able to make any sense of
the proposed mappings.
14. Conclusion
By now, it is hopefully clear that an adequate analysis of any given economic

metaphor should pay proper attention to its historical situatedness. By address-
ing the question of when a specific mapping was made, we begin to attend to the
peculiarities of what people knew – or did not know – about the relevant domains
at that time; we become alert to the particularities of the slots that were (not)
available in their schemata; and we begin to perceive the peculiarities of the
mappings that could be made at that particular point in the metaphor’s historical
trajectory. A historical perspective thereby helps us to see that the metaphors un-
derlying economic reasoning should be seen as flexible and dynamic processes,
rather than as fixed and static systems. Put differently, by shifting away from
the synchronic stance that shapes most contemporary perspectives on metaphor,
one avoids being misled into thinking that a particular set of mappings constitute
a permanent state in a static system, when it is really just a temporary station in
a dynamic process.
References
Alchian, A.A.
1950 Uncertainty, evolution, and economic theory. The Journal of Political
Economy 58(3): 211–221.
Aristotle
1984 The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation,
edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Black, M.
1955 Metaphor. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55:273–294.
Boulding, K.E.
1950 A Reconstruction of Economics. New York: Wiley & Sons.
Bowler, P.J.
1975 The changing meaning of ‘evolution’. Journal of the History of Ideas
36(1): 95–114.
Boyd, R.
1993 Metaphor and theory change: What is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for? In
Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony (ed). 481–532. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Caballero, R.
2007 Review of ‘Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation’, by Zoltán
Kövecses. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1): 109–118.
Campbell, N.R.
1920 Physics: The Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Christensen, P.P.
1994 Fire, motion, and productivity: The proto-energetics of nature and
economy in Francois Quesnay. In Natural Images in Economic
Thought, Philip Mirowski (ed.) 249–288. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Cohen, I.B.
1994 Newton and the social sciences, with special reference to economics,
or, the case of the missing paradigm. In Natural Images in Economic
Thought, Philip Mirowski (ed.) 249–288. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Crivellato, E. and Ribatti, D.
2006 A portrait of Aristotle as an anatomist. Clinical Anatomy 20(5): 447–
485.
Davanzati, B.
1588/1696 A Discourse upon Coins. Translated out of Italian by John Toland.
Accessed on 13.10.2010 at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/16th century/
coins.asp.
Denzau, A.T. and North, D.C.
1994 Shared mental models: Ideologies and institutions. Kyklos, 47(1):3–
31.
Eff, A.
1989 History of thought as ceremonial genealogy: The neglected influence
of Herbert Spencer on Thorstein Veblen. Journal of Economic Issues
23(3): 689–716.
Foa, B.
1982 Marshall revisited in the Age of DNA. Journal of Post Keynesian
Economics 5(1): 3–16.
Fogelin, R.
1994 Metaphors, similes, and similarity. In Aspects of Metaphor, Jaakko
Hintikka (ed.), 23–40. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Fogelin, R.J.
1988 Figuratively Speaking. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Frank, R.M., Dirven, R., Ziemke, T. and Bernardez, E. (eds)
2008 Body, Language, and Mind. Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gentner, D., Bowdle, B., Wolff, P., and Boronat, C.
2001 Metaphor is like analogy. In The analogical mind: Perspectives from
cognitive science Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N.
Kokinov (eds.), 199–253. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gilpin, R.
1996 Economic Evolution of National Systems. International Studies Quar-
terly, 40(3): 411–431.
Glassburner, B.
1955 Alfred Marshall on economic history and historical development. The
Quarterly Journal of Economics 69(4): 577–595.
Hacking, I.
2002 Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hesse, M.B.
1966 Models and Analogies in Science. University of Notre Dame Press.
Hodgson, G.M.
1993 The Mecca of Alfred Marshall. The Economic Journal 103(417): 406.
Hodgson, G.M.
1999 Evolution and Institutions: On Evolutionary Economics and the Evo-
lution of Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Hodgson, G.M.
2001 Is social evolution Lamarckian or Darwinian? In Darwinism and Evo-
lutionary Economics, Laurent, J. and Nightingale, J. (eds.), 87–120.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Hodgson, G.
2002 Institutional economics and the problem of historical specificity. InThe
Historicity of Economics: Continuities and Discontinuities of Histor-
ical Thought in 19th and 20th Century, Nau, H.H. and Schefold, B.
(eds), 92–125. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Hodgson, G.M.
2005 Alfred Marshall versus the historical school? Journal of Economic
Studies, 32(4):331–348.
Howe, J.
2008 Argument Is Argument: An Essay on Conceptual Metaphor and Verbal
Dispute. Metaphor and Symbol 23(1):1–23.
Kövecses, Z.
2006 Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Kövecses, Z.
2008 Conceptual metaphor theory: Some criticisms and alternative propos-
als. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6: 168–184.
Lakoff, G.
1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G.
1993 The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought,
Andrew Ortony (ed). 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lakoff, G.
2006 The neural theory of metaphor. Paper distributed on the electronic
discussion forum of the International Cognitive Linguistics Associa-
tion.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M.
1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Landau, M.
1972 Political Theory and Political Science: Studies in the Methodology of
Political Inquiry. Macmillan.
Limoges, C. and Menard, C.
1994 Organization and the division of labor: Biological metaphors at work in
Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics. In Natural Images in Eco-
nomic Thought, Philip Mirowski (ed.), 336–359. Cambridge: Cam-
Lovejoy, A.O.
1948 Essays in the History of Ideas. The Johns Hopkins Press.
Mandelbaum, M.
1957 The scientific background of evolutionary theory in biology. Journal
of the History of Ideas 18(3): 342–361.
Marshall, A.
1898 Distribution and exchange. The Economic Journal 8(29):37–59.
Marshall, A.
1890/1920 Principles of Economics (8th Edition). Macmillan and Co., Ltd.
McCloskey, D.N.
1998 The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Menand, L.
2002 The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Mirowski, P.
1983 An evolutionary theory of economics change:A review article. Journal
of Economic Issues, 17(3):757–768.
Mirowski, P.
1989 More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics; Physics as Na-
ture’s Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mouton, N.T.O.
2009 On the evolution of social scientific metaphors. Ph.D.-dissertation,
Copenhagen Business School.
Mouton, N.T.O.
2010 Metaphor, empiricism and truth: A fresh look at seventeenth-century
theories of figurative language. In TropicalTruth(s): The Epistemology
of Metaphor and Other Tropes, Burkhardt, A. and Nerlich, B. (eds.),
23–50. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Mouton, N.T.O.
Forthcoming Do metaphors evolve? The case of the social organism. Cognitive
Semiotics.
Nelson, R. and S.G. Winter
1982 An evolutionary theory of economic change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Nelson, R.
1995 Recent evolutionary theorizing about economic change. Journal of
Economic Literature, 33(1):48–90.
Nelson, R.
2002 Evolutionary theorizing in economics. In The Evolution of Cultural
Entities, Wheeler, M., Ziman, J., and Boden, M.A. (eds.), 135–144.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nerlich, B.
1989 The evolution of the concept of ‘linguistic evolution’in the nineteenth-
and twentieth century. Lingua 77: 101–112.
Nisbet, R.
1970 Genealogy, growth, and other metaphors. New Literary History 1(3):
351–363.
Nisbet, R.
2002 Sociology as an Art Form. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Oresme, N.
1956 The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme, and Mint Documents. Translated
with an introduction and notes by Charles Johnson. London: Thomas
Nelson and Sons.
Penrose, E.T.
1952 Biological Analogies in the Theory of the Firm. The American Eco-
nomic Review 42(5): 804–819.
Rorty, R.
1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press.
Searle, J.
1993 Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony (ed.), 83–111.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shanon, B.
1992 Metaphor: From fixedness and selection to differentiation and cre-
ation. Poetics Today 13(4): 659–685.
Skidelsky, R. (ed.)
1983 John Maynard Keynes. Volume One: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920.
London, Macmillan.
Spencer, H.
1873 The Study of Sociology. London, Henry S. King.
Spencer, H.
1891 Essays: Scientific, political, and speculative. (Fourth edition) London:
Williams and Norgate. Facsimile PDF available at:
http://files.libertyfund.org/files/335/0620-01 Bk.pdf.
Thomas, B.
1991 Alfred Marshall on economic biology. Review of Political Economy
3(1):1–14.
Tirrell, L.
1991 Reductive and non-reductive simile theories of metaphor. The Journal
of Philosophy 88(7): 337.
Veblen, T.
1898 Why is economics not an evolutionary science? The Quarterly Journal
of Economics, 12(4): 373–397.
Walker, D.A.
1991 Economics as social physics. The Economic Journal 101(406): 615–
631.
Ward, L.F.
1897 Review: Organisme Et Societe (Rene Worms); La Pathologie Sociale
(Paul De Lilienfeld). The American Journal of Sociology 3(2): 258–
265.
Ward, L.F.
1902 Contemporary sociology. The American Journal of Sociology 7(4):
475.
Willan, T.S.
1955 Some aspects of English trade with the Levant in the sixteenth century.
The English Historical Review, 70(276): 399–410
Towards a better understanding of metaphorical
networks in the language of economics:
The importance of theory-constitutive metaphors
Catherine Resche
Abstract
Many researchers on metaphors in the field of economics have shown interest in the press
coverage of economic events; some have included the discourse of textbooks, research
articles or businesses in their investigations, and all have underlined frequent references
to the economy as a machine or a human being. In this paper, I will endeavour to show how
important it is to consider the recurring networks of organic or mechanistic metaphors in
connection with theory-constitutive metaphors in economics. The diachronic perspective
will show that metaphors can be seen as a reflection of the evolution of economic thinking
over centuries, and can thus offer new insight into the field of economics. The heuristic
function of metaphor will be discussed at different levels – those of economic thinkers,
esp teachers and students. I will argue that, as far as terminology is concerned, many
a metaphor that is considered as dead is actually just dormant and can be revived at
any time to give birth to new metaphors branching out. Metaphors that seem to lose
ground, disappear or surface are worth paying attention to as they may reflect a turning
point in theory, and spur new approaches to economic problems. In this respect, I will
venture to plead for an observatory of metaphors, modelled on neology observatories,
with a view to monitoring the emergence of new metaphors. Metaphor could then either
be considered as a motor or a barometer of scientific progress and social evolution as
well.
1. Introduction
The overall goal of this paper is to suggest another approach to metaphor in

economics that may help researchers into and teachers of English for Specific
Purposes (esp) and their students gain new insight into the field. Actually, many
researchers working on metaphors in esp seem to focus on the most recurring
metaphors used by the semi-specialized press in order to help their students un-
derstand figurative expressions, enrich their style and retain vocabulary (Resche
1999, Boers 2000, Charteris-Black 2000, Resche 2001). This approach is quite
78 Catherine Resche
natural insofar as teachers of English for economics have not been trained as
economists. However, as is the case with terminology that helps to gradually
visualize how a field of knowledge is organized in conceptual networks, it seems
possible to hypothesize that metaphors can open a new path for the lay person.
Precisely, by trying to understand the origins of current metaphors and how they
belong to logical networks, in a bottom-up approach as it were, one can discover
the history of economic thinking and find interest in learning more about how
economics has been evolving as a science. Going back to the roots then enables
one to look at metaphors from a different angle, realize the impact of theory-
constitutive metaphors on fields of research and better understand the different
metaphorical networks that gradually seem to fit into a well-structured picture.
This top-down approach does not exclude the former bottom-up approach: both
approaches are complementary.
Metaphor has always been treated with both veneration and suspicion, and
this is particularly true in the realm of sciences. The first part thus discusses
metaphor as a controversial matter and underlines the efforts made by economists
to have their “soft” science recognized as a full-fledged scientific field. The sec-
ond part analyzes the main sciences which economics has been tempted to
borrow from – physics and mechanics on the one hand, biology on the other
hand – as evidenced by the main metaphorical veins running through the his-
tory of economic thinking. The third part discusses and illustrates the benefits
that can be derived from looking at a larger map of the metaphorical landscape
in economics. It insists on the heuristic function of metaphor for a number of
actors: theoreticians in the field of economics, teachers of esp and researchers
in the field, and students. The conclusion raises the question of metaphor as a
barometer or motor of scientific progress and social changes.
1.1. Metaphor: a controversial issue

Space is unfortunately too limited here to review the rich literature on metaphor,
but it is worth reminding the reader of the main positions that have been ex-
pressed on the topic. Since Aristotle, metaphor has been hotly debated, as a re-
sult of its ambivalence. Actually neither its qualities nor its shortcomings should
be overlooked. Depending on how Aristotle’s works have been read and inter-
preted, different conclusions have been drawn. Focusing on Poetics, people have
regarded metaphor as the privilege of the happy few who have a gift for creation.
As a means for embellishing reality, metaphor has been said to be well-suited
to the field of arts, but not to other fields, as it might distort the truth. In a word,
metaphor has been blamed for being irrational. However, in Rhetoric, Aristotle
underlined the role of metaphor in helping one to understand what is unknown
Towards a better understanding of metaphorical networks 79
through the lens of what is already familiar. Still, the critics of metaphor have
emphasized its use as a rhetorical device, and claimed that its suggestive power
could be used to influence, persuade and manipulate. The argument that, by us-
ing a particular metaphor, one can emphasize some traits and leave others in the
shadow – thus hiding part of the reality – has been put forward to advise against
using metaphors. The advocates of the substitution theory, for example, have ar-
gued that metaphors can always be stated literally and are therefore replaceable.
If this is true, however, substitution can only be achieved through a long para-
phrase; metaphor undeniably has a synthetic power, and its iconicity has been
underlined. Besides, the paraphrase – as is argued by the defenders of metaphor
as an indispensable cognitive tool – can only be produced ex post facto, i.e.
once the metaphor has filled its role of providing new insight. Metaphor is thus
irreplaceable. As Wittgenstein (1966) put it using a very telling image, metaphor
can be viewed as a ladder which you need to climb to embrace new horizons;
it is only after you have seen the new landscape that you can kick the ladder
away. Metaphor is then indispensable, insofar as it can help one understand and
discover new situations. As far as thinkers and researchers are concerned, it can
certainly encourage them to venture into untrodden territory. Another important
point about metaphor is that it can play a catachrestic role (Black 1962; Boyd
1993), filling a lexical or terminological void. Natural language was first used
for referring to objects or basic activities, so that its resources are limited as
regards supporting abstract thought: metaphor seems to be a means to enrich
these limited resources, by activating secondary meanings. Metaphor is thus a
means by which language develops and thought is enriched.
In short, the abundant literature on metaphor either considers it as an abuse
of language that obfuscates the truth, a deceptive ornament that disguises the
literal and corrupts thinking (Hobbes [1651]1962) or, in sharp contrast, as a
“fountain of meaning” (Grey 2000), a dynamic phenomenon essential to creative
thought and discovery. Obviously, the modern cognitive approach (Fauconnier
and Turner 1998), which insists on the new mental spaces that can be opened
by metaphor, supports the latter view.
1.2. Science and metaphor

The position of scientists towards metaphor has mirrored the debates mentioned
above. For those who consider that science must deal with facts and be ratio-
nal, metaphors should be avoided: Aristotle himself demanded that metaphor be
eliminated from the discourse of natural science. The argument often put forward
is that metaphor is a literary device spurring one’s imagination so that it cannot
perform a useful service in sciences, which require rational thinking. Scientists
80 Catherine Resche
might even lose credibility if they resorted to metaphors: unlike literary style,
which is by nature flowery, scientific style cannot suffer any embellishment.
Yet, metaphor stimulates creation and plays an essential role in the construction
of theory. As Cortezzi and Jin (1999: 154) insist, quoting Sutton (1994: 64):
“[Out of metaphors] many new thoughts have arisen, and new areas of subject
matter have been developed”. Scientists themselves cannot deny that metaphors
may have helped them on the road to discovery; simply, they may avoid them
when reporting their results, but this does not mean that metaphors were absent
from the process which led to their discovery. Actually, metaphor does play a
heuristic role, helping the researcher envision a new approach to a problem,
pointing out new paths that would have not been investigated otherwise. Even
those who maintain that metaphorical discourse is unscientific concede the ben-
efits of metaphor in educational settings. Admittedly, they seem to restrict the
use of metaphor to a separate category of what Kuhn (1993) calls ‘exegetical
metaphors’. However, as every scientist and every teacher must be trained, these
metaphors undeniably shape their minds and probably play a very important role
in the way they themselves transmit knowledge to future generations.
In this respect, it does not seem irrational to state that a scientific field not
only reproduces itself through metaphor, but also evolves and is enriched thanks
to metaphors, since metaphorical association provides a conceptual seed which
may grow into a new discovery or theory. In addition, since scientific fields are
not isolated, it is only natural that cross-fertilization should take place, which
is best achieved through metaphor: thinking of one domain in terms of another
helps the scientist and researcher consider problems from a new angle. This is
what Lakoff and Johnson (1984:193) have called “metaphorical thought”, la-
belling metaphor “imaginative rationality”, which seems to reconcile science
and metaphor. So we may assert with Henderson (1982, 1994) and Klamer
(2003) that metaphor holds a legitimate place in the discourse of specialists
and is not only reserved for educational purposes or the popularization of sci-
ence.
1.3. Economics and metaphor

The case of economics is particularly interesting as far as metaphor is con-
cerned, because, as a soft science, it had to acquire credibility and establish a
niche alongside other sciences that were considered more noble, rational and
respectful. Under such circumstances, one might have expected economists to
shun metaphors altogether. Yet, unlike other scientists, economists can neither
test their hypotheses in the real world, nor carry on their experiments in labora-
tories. For this reason, they devise models, write equations and draw graphs, all
of which are illustrations that economic thinking is at root metaphorical (Mc-

Closkey 1992: 12). Actually, from the beginning, the “father” of economics,
Adam Smith1 , resorted to a metaphor, the Invisible Hand, to refer to the self-
regulating power of the market. Economic theory is strewn with metaphors
associated with their inventors: Quesnay’s2 economic circuit, Walras’s3 auc-
tioneer, Marshall’s4 pair of scissors or billiard player, Keynes’s5 beauty pageant,
Okun’s6 leaky bucket metaphor, Lucas’s7 islands, to name but a few.
Much has been written about the most often quoted metaphor in economics,
the Invisible Hand metaphor, and how to interpret its three explicit occurrences
in Smith’s works ([1759, 1776] 1976), and I will return to this later but it is
particularly interesting for the present purpose to mention this metaphor as
emblematic of the idea that a metaphor can play several roles at once. It is a
heuristic metaphor that helped its author visualize the market mechanism; it is
an iconic metaphor which synthesizes a system that could only be described
through a long sentence otherwise; it performs a catachrestic role, filling a
terminological gap and it is an exegetical metaphor that has become familiar
to every student of economics. In addition, it can be considered as a theory-
constitutive metaphor (Boyd 1993), which has given birth to a school of thought
and inspired many thinkers. It also illustrates the debate around dead metaphors.
Many terms which have entered the terminology of a science seem to lose
their metaphorical origin in the eyes of their users. They are often considered
as dead metaphors, although ‘dormant’ might be a more accurate adjective.
Actually, the Invisible Hand metaphor has given birth to so many different,
sometimes diverging branches over time that it becomes obvious that a metaphor
that seems to have disappeared as such can always be revived to inspire new
research.
The language of economics abounds in such dormant metaphors which are
worth paying attention to as they reflect the scientific domains which eco-
nomics has borrowed from in order to structure itself. “Inflation”, “growth”, “the
economic cycle”, “equilibrium”, “leverage”, “market mechanisms”, “financial
instruments”, “the circulation of money”, “velocity”, “elasticity”, “liquidity”,
“capital inflows and outflows”, are but a few examples of terms borrowed from
1. Adam Smith (1723–1790)

2. François Quesnay (1694–1774)
3. Marie-Esprit Léon Walras (1834–1910)
4. Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)
5. John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)
6. Arthur Okun (1928–1980)
7. Robert Lucas (1937–)
82 Catherine Resche
physics or natural science. Both veins were virtually present in the original
Invisible Hand metaphor and, as we shall see presently, they have surfaced at
different times as economic theory developed.
2. Two main metaphorical veins running through economic theory
As I pointed out elsewhere (Resche 2005), the Invisible Hand metaphor can
be given a number of interpretations, especially if one remembers that Adam
Smith was not an economist in the modern sense of the term. In the eighteenth
century, economics was one of the branches of ‘moral philosophy’ which dealt
with social sciences, as opposed to ‘natural philosophy’ – the realm of ‘physi-
cal’ sciences. Adam Smith himself taught logic and rhetoric, morals and ethics,
and he was interested in many areas of knowledge. As a consequence, depend-
ing on whether one thinks of the teacher of morals, or the man with a natural
curiosity for biology, one may well consider that the Invisible Hand could re-
fer to God, or to Providence – also named the Great Arranger or the Great
Coordinator. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, implicit references to the In-
visible Hand seem to point at it as embodying the wisdom of nature, whether
this means the wisdom of nature’s Creator, man’s natural wisdom, or simply a
natural order. Another favourite interpretation of the Invisible Hand is just a me-
chanical force regulating the system. It is obvious that two types of metaphors
can be said to derive from the Invisible Hand metaphor: on the one hand, static
metaphors inspired from physics, with forces coming into play to achieve equi-
librium, and, on the other hand, dynamic metaphors supporting the idea of a
natural order. Both metaphorical veins have been running through economics
since then, and their paths have crossed. Sometimes, as emphasised by Mouton
in this book, one would prevail while the other would almost disappear, only
to surface again and thrive according to how technical or scientific progress
developed.
2.1. Metaphors inspired by mechanical physics

It is always difficult for a young discipline to gain its legitimacy as a science.
Accordingly, it seems that the best way for economics to acquire the status of a
scientific discipline was to model itself on a discipline that had already formed
its cognitive and institutional identity. Economics therefore sought to emulate
physics, which imposed itself in the nineteenth century as the standard by which
the scientific nature of other fields of knowledge could be judged. According
to Mirowski (1991), the emergence of marginalist economics in the 1870s was
intimately connected with the rise of energetics. Although the natural laws of
economics conveyed by the Invisible Hand metaphor may have been inspired
by metaphysics in the eighteenth century, they are very likely to have been
translated into mechanical laws a century later by neoclassical economists like
Cournot8 , Walras, Jevons9 or Pareto10 , among others, who had initially been
trained either as mathematicians or engineers. Nadeau (2003) suggests that
the latter just substituted economic variables for the variables in physics and
thus imposed notions like “optimisation”, “forces”, “leverage”, “equilibrium”
and “energy” which characterize the neo-classical school. What physics called
“energy” was coined “utility” by these economists. The protagonists of the
neoclassical revolution were themselves quite explicit in their writings about
the sources of their inspiration for their new theories. Jevons, who is known
to have attended Faraday’s lectures and read Joule’s papers explained utility as
follows:
Utility only exists when there is on the one side the person wanting and on the
other, the thing wanted [. . . ] Just as the gravitating force of a material body
depends not alone on the mass of that body, but upon the masses and the rela-
tive positions and distances of the surrounding material bodies, so utility is an
attraction between a wanting being and what is wanted. (1866: 284)
Walras also claimed that “the pure theory of economics is a science which
resembles the physico-mathematical sciences in every respect” (1969: 71). The
most pugnacious proponent of the physics metaphor was certainly Pareto:
[. . . ] Men have not freed themselves from these daydreams which people have
gotten rid of in the physical sciences, but which still burden the social sciences.
[. . . ] Thanks to the use of mathematics, this entire theory, as we develop it in the
Appendix, rests on no more than a fact of experience, that is, on the determina-
tion of the quantity of goods which constitute combinations between which the
individual is indifferent. The theory of economic science thus acquires the rigor
of rational mechanics. (1971: 36, 113)
Working on a synthesis of the principles of classical economists like Smith
and Ricardo11 , and the principles of the aforementioned marginalists, Marshall
insists on the place of mechanical analogies in economics, though, as Mouton
explains at length in the former chapter, he was much attracted by biology in
his approach to economics:
8. Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801–1877)

9. William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882)
10. Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (1848–1923)
11. David Ricardo (1772–1823)
84 Catherine Resche
The Mecca of the economist lies in economic biology. But biological concep-
tions are more complex than those of mechanics, a volume on Foundations must
therefore give a relatively large place to mechanical analogies (1920, xiv)
Characteristically, the Latin subtitle to his book on Principles of Economics:

Natura non facit saltum stresses the idea that nature does not proceed by leaps,
but undergoes a process of slow evolution. So do metaphorical veins: one may
seem to outshine another at a given period, and then recede, depending on how
receptive the scientific community is to new findings or how dependent on the
former generation’s metaphors it is. Very often, several sources of inspiration
are at play at a same period.
Still, the few examples above explain what has given birth to the proto-
metaphor “the economy is a mechanism” and many economic terms which are
commonly used can be seen as surface metaphors to be related to the theory-
constitutive metaphor that is itself rooted in the history of the discipline. The
non-interventionists will be satisfied with the idea that if the mechanisms work
well, the machine will run on its own; however, for the tenants of government
intervention, the machine metaphor is also appropriate: simply, the role of those
in charge is to keep an eye on the engine in case it should need maintenance
and repair. A telling illustration of the mechanistic metaphor is the Phillips12
machine, which can be seen at the London Science Museum. It was conceived
by a New Zealand-born engineer turned economist, who is better known for
the Phillips curve. Phillips designed the machine to demonstrate in a visual
way the circular flow of money within the economy and his machine was used
as a teaching aid at the London School of Economics. The machine, which is
composed of tanks, pipes, sluices, pulleys and valves is a material representation
of the mechanistic metaphor. It also illustrates the impact of Fluid Mechanics
on economics.
It is worth noting that, at one point, in the corporate world, a company was
also considered along mechanistic lines, as a rigid structure, and workers were
just seen as cogs in the wheels. Things have evolved, of course, but not so long
ago, “reengineering” and “restructuring” were still used as euphemisms for job
cuts, a sign that the mechanistic metaphor was not dead.
2.2. Biological and dynamic metaphors

Biology is the other source domain in economics, which gave rise to the proto-
metaphor “the economy is a living organism”. As already mentioned, this
metaphor has run through economics from the beginning, and some researchers
12. Bill Phillips (1914–1975)

have traced it back to Adam Smith. Although Grey (2000) mentions that an
autobiographical text intended by Darwin (1887) for his grandchildren seems to
point out that the theory of evolution by natural selection occurred to him after he
had been reading Malthus13 , Gould (1993) claims that Smith’s economic model
and metaphor were Darwin’s real sources of inspiration. Smith argued that if
everybody is left to pursue their own self-interest, the result will be the best
possible outcome of distribution of goods and services for all. Darwin adapted
this theory to the biological world, considering organisms as individuals pursu-
ing their own reproductive interest. Wherever the truth may lie, the relationship
between economics and the biological world has long existed. Smith’s division
of labour is a case in point. Another eighteenth-century economist, Quesnay14 ,
who had studied medicine and trained as a surgeon, contributed to the metaphor,
first because he believed in natural laws governing the economy, but also be-
cause he drafted his well-known Tableau économique (Economic Table) which
was meant to represent the circulation of riches in the economy; the phrase
“circulation of money” actually stems from Harvey’s discovery of blood circu-
lation in the body (Viner 1937), and Quesnay’s diagram is said to have inspired
other flow diagrams, based on the analogy with the circulation of blood in the
human body. Since then, the liquid element has become natural when dealing
with money in terms of “inflows and outflows of capital”, “pools of liquidity”,
“the drying up of liquidity”, or “fluctuations”.
Obviously, connected with the metaphor of the economy as an organism,
we can find “the economy is a human being” metaphor. In this context, when
there is a problem, a doctor is called in, who can diagnose the illness, cure the
“ailing economy”, and “inject liquidity” into the system to help the patient “re-
cover”. The human being metaphor then allows analogies with all the situations
a human being can ordinarily face. Examples are easy to find in macroeco-
nomics (“growth”, “economic cycles”, “economic development”) as well as in
microeconomics (“the life-cycle of products”, “the cradle-to-cradle approach”,
“competition for market shares”, “adaptation”, “change” and “mutation”). The
modern theory of the firm seems to have also evolved from mechanistic to biolog-
ical analogies (Penrose 1995[1952,1959]): reengineering has now been replaced
by “slimming”, “downsizing” or “rightsizing”; “Lean management” is taken for
granted; Teams have become cells that can grow or shrink to adapt to a given
situation; “Corporate DNA” can be scrutinized to diagnose the deficient genes;
Competition means adapting to a new context by innovating; There are “par-
ent” companies and “infant” industries with “teething” problems; Firms come
13. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834)

14. François Quesnay (1694–1774)
86 Catherine Resche
to life, grow, mature, decline and die, just as human beings. To survive in our
competitive environment, a company needs to be supple, flexible, agile; it must
avoid overweight if it is to be fit. Perhaps under the influence of fashion, fitness
and leanness seem to have become linked in people’s minds, and this is reflected
in the corporate metaphors, as pointed out by Syrett and Lammiman (1997: ix).
[W]hen a team of industrial researchers published a book in 1990 in which they
termed new production methods pioneered by Japanese car companies as ‘lean’,
the word struck a chord with a developed world that had recently espoused healthy
eating, competitive sport and working out as an ideal.
As Figure 1 points out, life, health, the environment and the living organism all
produce offshoots of a same metaphorical branch.
ORGANISM
LIFE HEALTH
Life cycle ENVIRONMENT

Fitness
Gestation, birth, survival adaptability

growth
innovation
birth of a new firm flexibility
niche
Figure 1. Offshoots of the economy-as-an-organism metaphor.
It is interesting to see how the financial instruments sector has also been influ-
enced by the living organism metaphor: one speaks of “the life of an option”,
which one may choose to exercise when it comes to “maturity”, unless one
prefers to let it “die” or “expire”.
Over time, economists have been influenced by the possible analogies be-
tween their discipline and natural sciences. Apart from Marshall who did view
economic development as an evolutionary process, economists like Veblen15 or
15. Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929). The 20th century evolutionary economics he
developed was based upon the description of economic behaviour as socially rather
Schumpeter16 were also attracted by evolutionary metaphors (Hodgson 1993;

1995). Veblen was influenced by Darwin and Spencer (1890) and he saw eco-
nomic organization as a process of ongoing evolution (Cordes 2007). In his essay
“Why is economics not an evolutionary science” (1898: 403), he claimed that
“modern sciences are evolutionary sciences”, adding “Economics is helplessly
behind the times, and unable to handle its subject-matter in a way to entitle it to
standing as a modern science”.
Schumpeter clearly stated that “the essential point to grasp is that in dealing
with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process.” (1962: 82) His
chapter on “creative destruction” is quite telling:
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational
developments from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same
process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old
one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the
essential fact about capitalism. (1962: 83)
Another direction in which the biological metaphor branched out is worth men-
tioning: bioeconomics. It was born a few decades ago, under the influence of
advances in molecular biology and it has opened a new avenue in the field
of economics (Resche 2002). Though it has triggered mixed feelings among
economists, it seems to have aroused real interest among managers in the cor-
porate world, allowing them to think of organisation in a new way. Bioeconomics
is based on the principle that any living organism is an autonomous agent, cease-
lessly seeking to survive by evolving in order to adapt to its environment and to
change. This suggests a dynamic system, best exemplified by a bacterium that
moves to find nutrients, to survive and reproduce. Reproduction, however, is
more complex than just a question of matter or energy: when a cell reproduces,
it does so according to a specific organization, which prevents anarchic evolu-
tion. Constraint construction is thus the first key notion. The second key idea is
that of the membrane, which determines what must be left out, what must be
kept in, and what can be allowed to go through the membrane. If these notions –
derived from the theory of non-linear dynamics, synergetics and the concept
of self-organization – are used as a lens through which to look at the economy
differently, it can help to consider men, markets and firms as autonomous agents
that have to adapt to survive.
than individually determined. He argued that economics could move away from a
static, individualistic perspective.
16. Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950) offered a dynamic theory of innovation, en-
trepreneurship and competition.
88 Catherine Resche
With the new technologies, the relationships between individuals and be-
tween firms have multiplied and thick networks have appeared, which offer a
lot of advantages, but also involve risks. It is true that it is important to build
incubators for new ideas by connecting people, but the more people and ideas
there are, the more necessary it is for a firm to assess the flows of information
it can manage, the amount of innovation it can sustain, the right environment it
must provide to make these innovative ideas profitable. In other words, it must
achieve the right balance between stability and innovation, control and disorder,
efficiency and experimentation, standardization and diversity. It is precisely at
this level that the simulation methods used in biology can be of interest as they
enable the firm to assess the right dose of change it can bear and to measure the
effects of a particular innovation. The new “econosphere” – a term coined after
“biosphere” – suggests another order, that of “bionomics”:
Needless to say, this thinking bears little resemblance to conventional economics.

Two centuries of economic thought, both capitalist and socialist, are based on the
concept of “economy as machine” rather than “economy as ecosystem”. Nonethe-
less, history has demonstrated that no economy behaves like a simple, cyclical
machine. Like ecosystems, economies are spectacularly complex and endlessly
adaptable. Consequently, it is bionomics – which studies economic relations
among organisms and their environment – that offers the best vantage point for
a total rethinking of the received economic wisdom.[. . . ] The traditional notion
of government’s economic role – pushing the buttons and twisting the dials of
society’s economic machinery – is replaced by a vision of government as the
astute cultivator of society’s economic ecosystem, patiently nurturing the natural
processes of growth. (Rothschild 1990: 4)
Observing how root metaphors have branched out into new directions can un-
doubtedly draw our attention to another function of metaphor, that of introducing
or signaling a turning point in theory; metaphor can then be seen as a mediator,
and perhaps a rebel, questioning the status quo, forcing people to reconsider
their approach to problems. Metaphor can open the way for theoretical muta-
tion. Such is the case in the field of neuroeconomics. Going one step further
than behavioural economists who had used insights from psychology, the neu-
roeconomists are turning to neuroscience to better understand what goes on in
the brain while decisions are being made, with a view to explaining seemingly
irrational behaviour. Though criticism has been leveled at this new school of
economics, on the ground that what matters are the decisions people actually
take – their “revealed preferences” – and not the process which leads to these de-
cisions, neuroeconomics has supporters. It should be noted that the forefathers
of neuroeconomics can be found among economists themselves. Characteristi-
cally, shortly after Jevons insisted that there was no way one could find out how
the human brain’s “black box” functioned, in 1881, Edgeworth17 called for the
creation of a “hedonimeter”, the ancestor of a brain scan, that could measure the
utility one gained from one’s decisions (Colander 2007). Other economists, like
Fisher18 , Ramsey19 or Hayek20 (1978), also developed an interest in the inner
workings of the brain. Ramsey even mentioned a machine that could measure
utility, which he called a “galvanometer”. Who knows what would have be-
come of the orthodox model of rational, utility-maximizing decision-making in
economics if mri (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) had existed in the nineteenth
century!
3. The importance of understanding the origins of metaphorical

networks
The proto-metaphors which have been mentioned so far have inspired theoreti-
cians from different schools and different times, tempting and convincing some,
influencing or discouraging others. It is important to point out that, in contribut-
ing to the construction of the theory of economics, they have followed routes
that were sometimes parallel, sometimes diverging; though the root metaphors
may even have seemed mutually exclusive at times, to such a point that one
may have developed at the expense of the other, they have both endured, and
regularly resurfaced.
It is therefore not surprising to find metaphorical networks overlapping, with
some of their branches intertwined, so that the outsider may feel confused.
Figure 2 illustrates this point showing the metaphorical networks used when
dealing with the risks to the economy.
The economy is first seen as a means of transport, in the context of the
mechanistic metaphorical vein. Depending on which vehicle is concerned, the
risks and negative outcomes of an overheating economy will be different. The
pilot of a plane caught in turbulence will have to land safely and the notions of
“fastening one’s seat belt” to prepare for a “hard-landing” and a “bumpy ride”
will immediately come to mind; but the passengers will applaud the pilot all the
17. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845–1926) He developed utility theory, introducing the
indifference curve.
18. Stanley Fisher (1943–)
19. Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–1930) Although a mathematician by training, he
made significant contributions in philosophy and economics.
20. Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992); His contributions in the field of cognitive
science is quite significant: For example, his connectionist hypothesis inspired much
of modern neurophysiology.
90 Catherine Resche
The economy as a
machine
Negative
Dangers outcomes
Storm
Explosion Crash,
Speed plane Fire
Death Accident
Puncture
Hot air Wreckage
balloon ship car
Overheating
Monitoring, Temperature
Tools, Fever
Instruments Sickness
Dials The economy as
Radar, a patient
Speedometer
Screens
Thermometer
Solutions
Prescribing a diet
Solutions Administrating drugs
Tightening the screws Surgery
Replacing pipes Injections (of liquidity
Stepping on the brakes into the system)
Fine-tuning the motor
Figure 2. How metaphorical networks can overlap.
more if he manages to ensure a “soft landing”. If the car metaphor is used, then
the driver will have to step on the brakes and drive cautiously; as for the captain
of a ship caught in a storm at sea, he will have to avoid navigational errors
and look for a “safe haven”. The terms “safe-haven currency”, or “anchor cur-
rency” do stem from this branch of the metaphorical network. Many crises are
indeed described as storms, and phrases like “a rising tide lifts all boats” have be-
come leitmotivs under such circumstances. When the economic engine has prob-
lems, “fine-tuning” is in order and the mechanic will have to do his best to use
the appropriate “economic tools” to “tighten the screws on the economy”. The
metaphors mentioned so far all stem from the same mechanistic source domain.
However, Figure 2 also shows that it just takes a notion like overheating and
high temperature to conjure up the idea of body temperature or fever, opening
the way for an altogether different source domain. Temperature can then be seen
as a node, with two branches going in different directions: the economy as a
machine or the economy as a human being, as a patient. While careful monitoring
of the economy will be achieved by keeping an eye on dials and screens in
the mechanistic context, it is the clinical thermometer that will be used in the
biological context and the patient’s blood pressure will be monitored. Depending
on the metaphorical branch that is chosen, the specialist will be a mechanic, a
driver, a captain, a pilot, an engineer or a doctor. Remedies will also vary; soft
ones might be enough, like stepping on the brakes, tightening or changing some
screws or prescribing a given diet, but in some cases, remedying the problem will
consist in replacing a worn-out part or operating on the patient. New instruments,
those of the surgeon, will then be called for. Another telling example of mixed
metaphors is the aforementioned Phillips machine: as a machine, it is inspired
by the mechanistic root metaphor and as an hydraulic model of income flow
in the national economy, it can be said to derive from Fluid Dynamics; but the
liquid metaphor is also associated with the circulation of blood in the human
body, which is itself an extension of the biological metaphor.
3.1. The heuristic function of metaphor for researchers and teachers

The heuristic function of metaphor for researchers in the field of economics
must now be evident: metaphor offers a new vantage point from where to look
at what seemed to be a familiar landscape. Undeniably, as was the case in the
past when the field of economics was being structured, recent progress in other
sciences has opened the way for new developments. Thus, fields like evolution-
ary economics, cognitive economics, complexity economics, consumer theory,
as well as environmental and ecological economics have significantly bene-
fited from research in the biological domain. However, this does not mean that
economics now disregards physics for inspiration. For example, development
economics, which studies the trade relations or capital flows between cities,
regions or countries, has borrowed from Newton’s gravity theory to build its
peripheral capitalism model. Other examples of a new approach to economics
through the lens of physics are illustrated by relatively recent fields of research
known as econophysics21 and thermoeconomics22 . Whatever the negative reac-
tions triggered among mainstream economists by research carried out in these
fields, the metaphorical approach allows the researchers to see economic phe-
nomena in a new light. The important point is that metaphor can then play its
heuristic role by generating new and potentially fruitful questions, even though
it may not answer existing ones.
21. Econophysics applies statistical mechanics to economic analysis. The term ‘statistical
finance’ stems from statistical physics.
22. According to thermoeconomists, human economic systems can be modelled as ther-
modynamic systems.
92 Catherine Resche
For a language teacher who has not been trained in economics, the first entry
door into the field of economics is of course through terminology, as terms denote
the scientific concepts, whose definitions can be found in textbooks. As these
terms are structured in conceptual networks, discovering these networks can
help the novice to grasp the relations between concepts in one particular domain.
However, it is obvious that a language researcher’s attention will be caught by
terms whose metaphorical connotation or origin may be lost on economists,
but retains its flavour for the uninitiated. Out of curiosity, he/she will try to
understand the reason why these terms have made their way into the theory, and
be particularly sensitive to the metaphorical networks that can be built around
them.
Terms with a metaphorical connotation seem to play a focal role for journal-
ists as well, who may or may not have been trained in economics and who de-
velop extended metaphors around the core metaphorical terms. Actually, many
metaphors used for popularizing economics derive from these terms with a
metaphorical ring and have not been chosen at random. Thus, liquid metaphors
will be fully exploited when dealing with money, but may not be clearly related
to the circulation of money in the economy – or blood in the human body – which
inspired the flow diagrams that can be found in every economics textbook. Un-
derstandably, a currency crisis will be translated into a storm at sea, and all the
attributes of a storm will naturally come to mind (winds, dark clouds, waves, a
ship caught in the storm, a maelstrom). Though the language teacher will have
no problem understanding the extended surface metaphors, he/she may well
just consider them as a generic code among journalists. Trying to understand
the concepts they refer to is a first step towards acquiring some background
knowledge in economics, but understanding what lies behind these recurring
metaphors will obviously broaden his/her cultural and scientific background,
and open new horizons in terms of grasping how economic reasoning functions
and how economics was built as a science. In this respect, it can be said that
starting from the surface metaphors and going back to the root metaphors helps
the researcher into and teacher of esp adopt a more holistic approach.
An appropriate test might consist in trying to understand what the “Goldilocks
economy” and partying may have in common in an economic context – for ex-
ample, when encountering the phrase “take the punch bowl away just when the
party is getting going”. Incidentally, the latter phrase was coined by a former Fed
Governor, William McChesnay Martin, which shows that specialists themselves
coin metaphors that are then echoed by the media. Reading more closely, one
may understand that the Goldilocks economy, a metaphor which has also been
used by Alan Greenspan, is “neither too hot, nor too cold”, but “just right”. As
for the party, it refers to the idea that any “host” should see to it that his party
shall not be spoilt by people who might overindulge in drinking: the longer they
overindulge, the worse the eventual hangover. Both metaphorical situations refer
to the need to avoid any extreme and to aim at “the right dose”. For the economist,
clearly, the reference is the context of economic policy, whose aim is to sustain
growth while avoiding overheating. On the one hand, it is important to fuel the
economic engine, to make sure it keeps going; on the other hand, it is vital to be
ready to step on the brakes if necessary, while avoiding causing the economy to
come to a halt. The underpinning root metaphor is obviously a mechanistic one.
The idea of a continuum between the root or theory-constitutive metaphors
and their various branches across time and place seems to echo the idea of
a continuum between specialized discourse, semi-specialized or popularized
discourse and common language. Journalists take their inspiration from the
core metaphorical terms stemming from the root metaphors and extend the
metaphors by choosing elements from everyone’s experience of everyday life.
Obviously, surface metaphors as developed by the press need to find an echo in
every reader. Another example of how important it is to have a larger picture of
the metaphorical networks and their raison d’être can be found in the metaphors
that were used by the advocates and critics of the European Monetary Union
(Resche 1999) before the euro was born.
Monetary Union
Marriage A journey A club Construction
Religion A quest Transport A building
A ship A plane A train
Divorce Shipwreck Crash Break-up

Derailment Crumbling
Figure 3. Metaphorical networks around “Monetary Union”.
Figure 3 shows that the notion of a “Union” immediately triggered the marriage
metaphor, with all the associated notions of courtship, the wedding ceremony,
etc. For some, marriage might also connote a religious ceremony, a very official
94 Catherine Resche
pledge to stay together, “for better, for worse”. Actually marriage is also a
familiar metaphor for mergers so that it is easy to think of the single currency
as a merger between different currencies. In addition, seen as the happy ending
of a long process of relationship building, “union” also conveys the idea of
construction as well as that of a journey. For the religious-minded, the journey
may even be considered as a quest. “Life is a journey” is a familiar metaphor
(Lakoff and Johnson 1984), and it might well be all that the surface metaphor
could mean for those who fail to be conscious of the root metaphors. “Union”
could also commonly refer to a group, a team, a club. But all these metaphorical
branches share a common denominator: personification. Currencies are persons,
not machines. It is also important to point out that, when the likelihood of failure
or break up is mentioned, the favourite metaphors will logically revolve around
the themes of divorce, battles, or war. Beyond the surface metaphors, fighting for
one’s life and survival is at stake, and the underpinning biological root metaphor
should be obvious. In times of crisis, turbulence is a commonly-used metaphor
(White 2004), and the risks to the monetary union are therefore described in
terms of a ship or a plane caught in a storm. If one remembers the main extensions
of the mechanistic metaphor to describe the risks to the economy, it is impossible
not to draw a parallel with the way the risks to the European Monetary Union are
mentioned metaphorically. Associations with other catastrophes like a building
crumbling as a result of an earthquake are easy to imagine.
Again, the metaphorical networks around the euro evidence interferences be-
tween organic (human beings) and mechanistic metaphors (vehicles, structures).
3.2. The benefits of root metaphor awareness for students in the esp field
Metaphor use in the classroom (Holton 1984) is often related to the characteristic
need to explain the unknown by referring to what is familiar. Teachers and text-
book authors naturally use exegetical metaphors to support their explanations.
However, as Debatin (1995: 2) insists, “underneath the surface level of obvious
pedagogical illustrative imagery, there is always a deeper layer of fundamental
metaphors, which control even the logic of seemingly non-metaphorical dis-
course and therefore lie in the blind spot of theoretical reflection”. Being able to
paint a larger, clearer picture of the metaphorical landscape can therefore help
the language teacher in several ways in the classroom. For example, students of
English as a foreign language may not be aware of the metaphors contained in
the following examples from current textbooks:
If output is growing rapidly and inflation is rising, the Federal Reserve Board is
likely to raise interest rates as this puts a brake on the economy and reduces price
pressures. (Samuelson and Nordhaus 2005: 531) [emphasis mine]
No market mechanism provides an automatic pilot that can quickly eliminate

macroeconomic fluctuations, and governments therefore take responsibility for
moderating the swings of the business cycle (Samuelson and Nordhaus 2005:
550) [emphasis mine]
The Fed could inject some money into the economy by buying some government
bonds from the public in open-market operations. What happens after such a
monetary injection? (Mankiw 1998: 613) [emphasis mine]
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons,
they can only tell us when the storm is long past, the ocean will be flat. (Keynes,
quoted by Mankiw 1998:355) [emphasis mine]
The role of the language teacher will first consist in sensitizing the students to the
metaphorical domains at stake in these various extracts and activate the heuristic
function of metaphor to push them to go further into their investigations of the
concepts and the metaphorical fields that sustain them. Specialized reading can
certainly be improved by enhancing the students’ awareness of metaphor (Boers
2000). Besides, retention of unfamiliar figurative expressions is obviously fa-
cilitated if lexical items are organized along metaphorical themes or source
domains. Grasping the underlying logic, the students can become familiar with
a growing number of phrases pertaining to a particular field, and adopt them,
improving their style. Ordinarily, in one’s mother tongue, the use of a given term
triggers the use of related words, but this is not so obvious for foreign language
learners. Greater awareness of the metaphorical networks and their origins will
surely make the collocational patterns the metaphorical terms enter into easier
to retain.
Figure 4 illustrates this point with the metaphorical network around mergers.
It underlines the fact that, once established, a metaphor can be realized through an
infinite number of metaphorical expressions. If the students can be made aware
that a merger can either be regarded as a love story or, in the case of unfriendly
dealings, as a hunting ground or a battlefield, they will find it easier to concentrate
on the phrases commonly used in the various situations. Incidentally, it will also
be worth insisting on the fact that, in spite of their metaphorical nature, “poison
pills” are actual strategies in finance, and that the “white” or “black knights” are
terms officially used by the specialists and not mere allusions to the tournaments
of ancient times of chivalry23 . Obviously, the metaphorical ring and the remarks
23. It should be obvious that a white knight is not so generous as the term might suggest:
of course, it refers to an investor who means to rescue a firm threatened by a predator
or “raider” – the black knight. The latter’s goal is to put his hand on the “Crown
jewels”. But actually the white knight does not come by mere chance and is no
philanthropist.
96 Catherine Resche
Love → Marriage Battle / War
Fight
Divorce Big vs.small
Hunting
Figure 4. The metaphorical networks around mergers (also see their lexical deployment
in the note section24 ).
triggered by the explanations of these terms will help students remember them
more easily.
Secondly, raising the students’ awareness of metaphorical networks will be
an opportunity to insist on the fact that language and culture should not be
dissociated: many students of economics tend to disregard the history of eco-
nomic thinking and only focus on mathematics and econometrics. Insisting on
the theory-constitutive metaphors and the cross-fertilization of sciences may
arouse interest in metaphor as a fundamental means of conceptualization. This
may open the way for a new approach to theory through its linguistic expression,
showing that language translates viewpoints and is rooted in culture, history and
civilization. Instead of being confused by the way lexis is deployed figuratively,
they will themselves have a more complete view of the economic domain, un-
derstanding that the different metaphorical branches are just manifestations of
the vitality of the root metaphors.
24. Marriage: to court, to woo, a well-endowed suitor, courtship, flirt, flirtation, love at
first sight, a love match, a love affair, a liaison, marriage prospects, to announce one’s
betrothal / one’s engagement, to send the wedding invitations, the bride-to-be, the
bride, the bridegroom, the bridesmaid, an alliance, to tie the marriage knot, marriage
bonds, wedlock, the marriage ceremony, the marriage vows, for better or for worse,
the pair, the newly-weds, a mating dance, staying single, to step in to spoil the party,
a marriage of convenience, a marriage of blue bloods, to make it to the altar, to
consummate a marriage, the white knight, to go / come to someone’s rescue.
Divorce: to split up, to break up the engagement, custody battles, to part.
Fight: The contenders, the combat heats up, to enlist outsiders, a heavyweight, a
featherweight.
Thirdly, studying metaphors and linking them to the root metaphors may
help to develop a critical mind: pointing out that metaphors may not be innocent
may draw the students’ attention to the reason behind the choice of a particular
metaphor and the potential meaning that can be derived from it. Students of
economics are familiar with the theory of opportunity cost: it is therefore easy
to convey the message that any metaphor has an opportunity cost and that, when
choosing to express one’s ideas through a given metaphor, one automatically
gives up other options, a choice that will surely influence the reader or public.
This should not be taken to mean that whenever an author uses terms such
as “levers” or “forces”, he should automatically be understood to consider the
economy as a machine: such a stance would be too categorical and systematic.
However, as Boers points out (2000), it is when the author has a choice between
different metaphors that his choice may be interesting to analyze.
Among the several functions of metaphors listed by Henderson (1994: 343),
one is that it can be used as a basis for argument, and this is where critical
reading will matter; students must therefore realize that metaphor can be a
bearer of ideology:
Metaphor can be viewed as a useful teaching device; as a central organising

principle of all language; as a way of viewing and constructing new problems; as
a fundamental basis for argument and storytelling.
Conclusion
This chapter has been an opportunity to mention a number of functions per-

formed by metaphor: The heuristic function that helps thinkers to discover new
horizons, the pedagogical function that helps share one’s discovery and explain
theory to the uninitiated. Metaphor has also been shown to be a springboard for
the teacher of esp who discovers economics as a non-specialist: starting from
surface metaphors, he/she can gradually carry on his/her own investigations
Battle/war: to enter the fray, bitter fighting, skirmishes, a raid, a hostile raider, the
combatants, financial firepower, to get ready for an attack, the offensive, a clash, an
arch-rival, to join forces, bloodshed, bloodletting, to be on the defensive, to retaliate,
entrenchment, arch-enemies
Big vs. small: colossus, giant, titan, Goliath, David, monster deal, to eat up, appetite,
big beasts, mammoth takeover battle, behemoths.
Hunting / battle / big vs. small: to be takeover bait, prey, target, poison pills.
Hunting: to be on the prowl, to hunt for preys, to smell blood, a predator, the hunter,
the hunted, to lick one’s wounds, hunting season, hunting ground.
98 Catherine Resche
and find out how surface metaphors are related to deeper layers of fundamen-
tal, theory-constitutive metaphors. In the process, other functions of metaphors
are fore-grounded: metaphor favours or signals paradigm shifts in sciences, it
forces questioning (Resche 2007) and can be seen as a rebel at times; it also
acts as an interface (Resche 2006) between different fields of science. The in-
fluence of physics, mechanics, biology, neuroscience, has been established, but
it would also be worth considering the influence of economics on other sci-
ences.
From a more general point of view, it would be enriching to observe the cross-
fertilization of different fields of knowledge in order to determine whether the
same metaphorical veins run through different scientific domains at the same
periods of time under the influence of scientific progress or/and Man’s social
preoccupations at a given time. If so, it should be possible to learn from shifts
in metaphorical paradigms by just observing metaphors along the diachronic
axis. How influential a science has been over time could also be determined by
assessing how much other sciences have borrowed from it to develop their own
theories. Adopting a history-of-economic-thought perspective would certainly
be of interest for historians and sociologists, as well and linguists and termi-
nologists. For these reasons, and considering that metaphor can be a motor as
well as a barometer of change, I would suggest setting up an observatory of
metaphors, modeled after the system used by terminologists to monitor the new
terms that are coined as a reflection of new concepts or objects. As Borges (1985:
224) suggested, “it may be that universal history is the history of a handful of
metaphors”.
To paint as objective a picture of metaphor as possible, I would like to remind
the reader of its two major drawbacks: while opening the way for investigation
in one direction, metaphor unavoidably blocks other paths, which can be detri-
mental to the direction of future research for some time in a specific field; it can
also be a means to influence opinions and surreptitiously convey an ideological
message. In all cases, whether its effects are positive or negative, metaphor does
make a difference. Robert Frost’s last three lines of The road not taken can surely
express this idea more poetically and forcefully:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
References
Aristotle
1991 Rhetoric.Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Aristotle
2008 Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. <URL: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/
poetics.html> (27th June 2008).
Black, Max
1962 Models and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Boers, Franck
2000 Enhancing metaphoric awareness in specialised reading. English for
Specific Purposes 19(2), Elsevier Science Ltd.: 137–147.
Borges, Jorge L.
1985 Reprint The Fearful Sphere of Pascal. In Labyrinths, Donald A. Yates and
James E. Irby (eds.) Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin.
Original edition, 1962.
Boyd, Richard
1993 Reprint Metaphor and theory change: What is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for? In
Metaphor and Thought, A. Ortony (ed.), 481–532. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. Original edition, 1979.
2000 Metaphor and vocabulary teaching in esp economics. English for Spe-
cific Purposes 19(2) Elsevier Science Ltd.: 149–165.
Colander, David
2007 Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility. Journal
of Economic Perspectives.
Cordes, Christian
2007 Turning economics into an evolutionary science: Veblen, the selection
metaphor and analogical thinking, Journal of Economic Issues.
Cortezzi Martin and Lixian Jin
1999 Bridges to Learning. In Researching and Applying Metaphor, Lynn
Cameron & G. Low (eds.), 149–176. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Darwin, Charles
1887 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. London: John Murray.
Debatin, Bernhard
1995 Précis of the Rationality of Metaphor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner
1998 Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science 22(2): 133–187.
Gould, Stephen J.
1993 Eight Little Piggies. London: Penguin Books.
Grey, William
2000 Metaphor and Meaning. Minerva – An Internet Journal of Philosophy.
<URL:http://www.ul.ie/∼philos/vol4/metaphor.HTML>.
100 Catherine Resche
Hayek, Friedrich
1978 New studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of
Ideas. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Henderson, Willie
1982 Metaphor in Economics. Economics 18 (4): 147–157.
Henderson, Willie
1994 Metaphor and Economics. In R. Backhouse (ed.), New Approaches to
Economics Methodology, 343–367. London: Routledge.
Hobbes, Thomas
1962 Reprint Leviathan. John Plamenetz (ed.). London: Collins. Original edition,
1651.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M.
1993 Economics and Evolution: Bringing Life Back into Economics. Cam-
bridge, UK /Ann Arbor (MI): Polity Press and University of Michigan
Press.
1995 Economics and Evolution. Marshall Studies Bulletin 5, 41–50. <URL:
http://www.cce.unifi.it/rivista/hodg5.htm> (July 10th, 2008).
Holton, Gerald
1984 Metaphors in science and education. In Metaphors of Education, W.
Taylor (dir.), London: Heinemann.
Jevons, Stanley
1866 Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Econ-
omy. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 29: 282–287. <URL:
http://ideas.repec.org/s/hay/hetart.html> (30th June 2008).
Klamer, Arjo
2003 The Art of Economic Persuasion: about Rhetoric and All That, <URL:
http://www.klamer.nl/ch-draft.doc> (July 4th, 2008).
Kuhn, Thomas S.
1993 Metaphor in Science. In A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
1984 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mankiw, Gregory
1998 Reprint Principles of Economics, 2d edition, Thomson South-Western.
Marshall, Alfred
1920 Reprint Principles of Economics, 8th ed., MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
<http://www.econlib.org/library/marshall/marP0.html> (4 July 2008)
original edition, 1890.
McCloskey, Deirdre
1992 If you’re So Smart. The Narrative of Economic Expertise. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Mirowski, Philip
1991 More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Na-
ture’s Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nadeau, Robert L.
2003 The Wealth of Nature: How Mainstream Economics Failed the Envi-
ronment. New York: Columbia University Press.
Pareto, Wilfredo
1971 Manual of Political Economy, Ann, S. Schwier & Alfred Page (eds.),
translated by Ann S. Schwier, New York: Augustus Mc Kelley.
Penrose, Edith T.
1995 Reprint Biological Analogies in the Theory of the Firm. In Economics and Bi-
ology, G.M. Hodgson (ed.), 804–819, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Orig-
inal edition, American Economic Review, 42(4), 1952.
Penrose, Edith T.
1995 Reprint The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Orig-
inal edition, 1959.
Resche, Catherine
1999 Un réseau de voies d’accès à la langue spécialisée en anglais L2, ASp
23–26: 349–373.
Resche, Catherine
2001 Metaphors in English for economics: for a language-based approach
with L2 learners, ASp 31–33: 239–259.
Resche, Catherine
2002 La métaphore en langue spécialisée, entre médiation et contradiction :
étude d’une mutation métaphorique en anglais économique, ASp 35–
36: 103–119.
Resche, Catherine
2005 Réflexions à partir d’une métaphore banalisée en économie : la ‘Main
Invisible’ d’Adam Smith. Leçons et perspectives. In Métaphore et
Anglais de spécialité, Marie-Hélène Fries (ed.), 57–76. Collection
Travaux 20.25, Université Victor Segalen, Bordeaux 2.
Resche, Catherine
2006 La métaphore dans le domaine économique : lieu d’interface entre
langue et culture. In Langues et cultures, une histoire d’interface,
Rosalind Greenstein (ed.), 13–43. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.
Resche Catherine
2007 ‘Human capital’ : l’avers et le revers d’un terme métaphorique, ESP
and Professional Communication, DSFF 7 (2), Copenhagen, Den-
mark: 23–48.
Rothschild, Michael
1990 Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, New York: Henry Holt and Com-
pany.
2005 Reprint. Economics, 18th edition, McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Schumpeter, Joseph A.
1962 Reprint Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, NewYork: Harper Row. Orig-
inal edition, 1942.
102 Catherine Resche
Smith, Adam
1976 Reprint The Theory of Moral Sentiments. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (eds.),
Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. Original edition, 1759.
Smith, Adam
1976 Reprint An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. R.H.
Campbell and A.S. Skinner (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Original edition, 1776.
Spencer, Herbert
1890 Reprint First Principles, fifth edition, London: Williams and Norgate. Original
edition.
Syrett, Michel and Jean Lammiman
1997 From Leanness to Fitness: Developing Corporate Muscle. London:
Institute of Personal Development.
Veblen, Thorstein
1898 Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science. The Quarterly Jour-
nal of Economics 12. <http://prof.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/∼hhirano/
academia/econom.htm> (12 July 2008)
Viner, Jacob
1937 Studies in the Theory of International Trade. London/New York: Allen
and Unwin.
Walras, Léon
1969 Elements of Pure Economics. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
White, Michael
2004 Turbulence and turmoil in the market or the language of a financial
crisis. Ibérica 7: 71–86.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
1961 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (trans.) D.F. Pears and B.F. McGui-
ness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Metaphors of the Brazilian Economy
from 1964 to 2010
Tony Berber Sardinha
Abstract
Brazil is a growing economy, expected to be the fifth largest in the world within a decade.
Such growth has been accompanied by serious economic problems over the years, the
most persistent of which being inflation. In the last forty years, the country has battled
inflation in many different ways, and this has been framed by a number of key metaphors.
I claim that a set of large scale policy making metaphors has been a major tool in devising,
delivering and sustaining anti-inflation measures. Some were successful, although most
had tragic consequences. In this paper, I look at 40 years of metaphors that have been
used to refer to the Brazilian economy, particularly to inflation, as well as at the different
ways several administrations have tried to defeat it. From president speeches to magazine
reports to electronic corpora, a range of different sources have been consulted to serve as
data for this investigation. The paper offers a chronological account of major economic
periods of the country, while presenting and discussing key metaphors that have been
used during each one.
1. Introduction
The role of metaphor in shaping thought and action is well documented in the
literature (Gibbs 2008). What is perhaps less understood is how metaphors help
conceptualize, carry out and sustain large scale intervention in the world, in fields
such as politics, the economy and war. A case in point is the Domino Effect,
which designated a chain reaction in a sequence of objects (domino tiles) caused
by the fall of one of these elements. This was bandied about mainly in the 1960’s
as justification for the continued war effort by the Americans in South Vietnam.
The fear was that the fall of that country to communism would precipitate the fall
of neighboring countries in the region. The metaphor of countries as domino
tiles may be seen as decisive in reigning in support for the war (Warburton
2007: 51–52). In that metaphor, South East Asian countries are seen as unstable
thin tiles lined up together, communism as an outsider who may knock down
the tiles, the subcontinent as a table where the rocks are resting, and America
104 Tony Berber Sardinha
as the keeper of the domino line. In addition to potentially bringing to mind

these mappings, the effectiveness of the metaphor also rested on the fact that
most people see such domino knock-down lines to be fragile, and (if dominos
are aligned correctly) once the process of toppling the tiles is in motion, it is
nearly impossible to stop the remaining ones from falling. Consequently, despite
criticism, American military presence in Vietnam was perceived by many as a
necessary evil. As it turned out, the metaphor proved false, since the other
countries in the region did not become communist once the US pulled out its
troops.
In this paper, I want to argue that economic policies in Brazil have been dom-
inated by long-lasting metaphors, which shaped thinking and action. I focus on
nearly fifty years of economic intervention in the country, through economic
plans and the presidents behind them in the past decades. For each of these, I
single out key metaphors found in texts, written and spoken, of that period. I
also resort to large online corpora of Portuguese (Corpus Brasileiro, corpus-
brasileiro.pucsp.br, and Corpus do Português, corpusdoportugues.org) for data
to help determine the typical lexico-gramatical patterns associated with key
terms from each period. These data assist in deriving metaphors that are not
explicit in individual texts, but which may surface once large quantities of data
are examined at once. Although the focus is on the economy, politics will also
be addressed whenever necessary, since politicians have always been behind
major economic decisions. They have risen and fallen as a result of economic
performance.
Perhaps no other country has seen as many different economic plans unveiled
in the same amount of time. Singer (2009: 86) referred to the country as a
“giant laboratory of macroeconomic experiments” (evoking metaphors such as
the country as laboratory, economic plans as laboratory experiments,
and economics as hard science). In the wake of these experiments came a
host of metaphors, which will be discussed below.
2. Military rule (1964–1985)
Brazil was run by military presidents from 1964 through 1985. This period
became known as anos de chumbo ‘lead years’, itself an interesting case of
metonymies such as raw material for group (lead stands for the military, a
group in turn defined by lead-based ammunition needed to power their guns)
and action for instrument (the action of oppressing the people is under-
stood in terms of instruments used to carry out the oppression, namely shooting
guns). During the military regime (1964–1985), four major economic plans
were enacted. The first was called Plano de Ação Econômica do Governo
(PAEG) [Governmental Plan for Economic Action], and took place between
1964 and 1966, during Castello Branco’s presidency. After that, three other
plans followed. They were each called PND, short for Plano Nacional de De-
senvolvimento [National Development Plan], and were carried out by a different
president during his term in office. The first PND was executed during Presi-
dent’s Emı́lio Garrastazu Médici administration (1969 through 1974), the sec-
ond in Ernesto Geisel’s (1974–1979), and the third one during João Baptista
Figueiredo’s presidency (1979–1985). Each had its own priorities, but all of
them aimed generally at growing and regulating the economy, improving in-
frastructure and controlling inflation. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the
Brazilian economy grew at a very fast pace, between 9.5% to 14% from 1968
through 1974. Overall, along the whole period of military dictatorship from
1964 through 1985, Brazil’s economy grew at an impressive average of 6.15%
per year, higher than both the average world economy at 3.66% and developing
countries at 4.78% (Cysne 1993: 186). At the same time, inflation kept rising.
The PAEG saw salary increases as the culprit: Businesses were encouraged to
adjust salaries at rates lower than inflation. The rationale was that price increases
would eventually match the rate of salary raises and inflation would then drop,
thus benefitting workers in the long run. Eventually, runaway inflation did set
in, which led to a host of anti-inflationary packages, especially in the 1980’s,
when the country was back under civilian rule (see sections below). Foreign
borrowing was high under the military, which led to growing foreign debt,
made worse by the oil crises of the 1970’s and shrinking international credit
lines.
A number of key metaphors were introduced in those years. The main one
is perhaps milagre econômico [economic miracle]. Here, the economy is re-
ligion, and rapid economic expansion is seen as a divine intervention. This
metaphor is not unique to Brazil, as it refers to other countries which experi-
enced record rates of growth, such as post-World War II Japan. Linked to that
is the metaphor of crescer o bolo [cake rising], used by Delfim Netto, chief
economic advisor to the military presidents, and former cabinet minister. The
metaphor of wealth as a cake was employed to define Delfim’s approach that
insisted the economy should grow and generate enough wealth before it was
spread around. This strategy has been blamed for the country’s extremely un-
equal income distribution, made worse as a result of military rule policies. The
Gini coefficient, which is best at its lowest, in 1960 was .5, rising to .56 in 1970
and 1980 (Cysne 1993: 190); it has remained roughly the same after that, reach-
ing .59 in 1990, then dropping slightly to .54 in 2009, making the country the
9th worst in the world (in 2009 the best distribution is found in Sweden, with
Gini at .23, and the worst in Namibia at .7). Interestingly, critics of cake rising
economics also employ it for their own benefit, arguing that the time has come
for sharing the cake dividir o bolo (see below how Lula’s administration has
blown new life into this metaphor recently). Another metaphor that represents
military rule economy is arrocho salarial [salary squeeze] – arrocho means
a stick used for tightening a rope. In this metaphor, a salary is an object,
and a salary reduction measure is a tightening stick. Finally, the mil-
itary are credited with instituting the ciranda financeira (Souza 2009), which
O’Dougherty (2002: 72) explains as follows:
The non-productive, speculative financial market is known disparagingly in Por-
tuguese as the ciranda financeira. Ciranda is a ring-around-the-rosy type of game;
the phrase thus condemns the vicious circle of financial markets.
Hence, this sees financial markets as a game, and the children who dance
around in a circle map onto both the bankers handling the investments and the
sums being moved around from one bank to another, with profits mapping onto
the fun generated by playing the game.
Throughout military rule, presidential elections were held by Electoral Col-
lege, and president candidates had to be chosen from within the ranks of the
Armed Forces only, more specifically from the Army. A process of political re-
form designed to hand power back to civilians had been underway during the
mandate of João Figueiredo, the last of the generals in charge. This would al-
low for the election of the first civilian president in over a quarter of a century,
thus marking the end of military rule. The process of devolving power to the
people was known as abertura [opening], and it was described as lenta, gradual
e segura [slow, gradual and secure], expressing metaphors such as political
power is a container, safe is slow and safe is gradual. This was based on
fear, and the argument was that a rushed transition to democracy would be risky,
because feelings of resentment and revenge might lead the opposition to insist
on bringing leaders of the military regime to justice, which in turn might cause
civil unrest. As a result, based on the no rush metaphor, the military leaders
added an extra year to president Figueiredo’s term, so that he could ensure that
the transition was peaceful and orderly.
Corpus data for the military economic plans is lacking in both the Corpus
Brasileiro and the Corpus do Português, suggesting that these plans have been
all but forgotten. However, ditadura military [military dictatorship] is a very
frequent phrase in Brazilian Portuguese, with over 19,000 hits in the Corpus
Brasileiro. Its top collocates form three main sets, one around the notion of time
anos [years], perı́odo [period], época [era/time], the other around the opposition
to the regime luta [fight], resistência [resistance], desaparecidos [missing], and
the third one around its ruthless nature repressão [repression], guerra [war], and
golpe [coup]. These suggest a metaphor such as opposing a ruthless military
dictatorship is a long process.
3. Plano Cruzado ‘Cruzado Plan’ (1986)
According to the “slow transition” scheme, the first civilian president would be
elected by Electoral College and not by direct vote. This was met with discontent,
leading to protests and rallies across the country, in a campaign that became
known as Diretas Já [Direct elections now] between 1983 and 1984. In April
1984, a bill restoring popular vote was brought to congress, but was defeated,
and the election of the first civilian president after military rule was carried
out by indirect ballot through an Electoral College, just like during the military
regime.
Tancredo Neves, of the opposition party, was chosen president, with José
Sarney, of the ruling party, as vice-president. However, Tancredo fell ill, and due
to multiple surgeries, could not take the oath of office, thus on March 15, 1985
Sarney became acting president. Tancredo eventually died of complications and
generalized infection on April 21, 1985, and Sarney was then sworn in officially
as president. Many considered it tragic that the long battle by the opposition
to restore civilian rule ended up with the election of a politician such as José
Sarney, a long-time supporter of the military coup.
Amidst rampant inflation, Sarney launched an economic stabilization act,
officially titled Inflação Zero [Zero Inflation], in February 1986. Its main points
were freezes on salaries, wages, exchange rate, rent, and mortgage payments. It
also included a ban on indexation, that is, automatic price and wage increases,
and the introduction of a Gatilho Salarial [Wage Trigger], an [inflation insur-
ance] provision by which salaries were raised automatically each time inflation
reached 20%. The “gatilho is a bellicose metaphor” referring to inflation as
a beast and lowering inflation as a hunt. The plan maps onto the hunter,
and workers, onto defenseless beings needing protection from that creature.
In his address to the nation, in the morning of March 1, 1986, the president
announced the plan. Below is an excerpt.
We have run the course on palliative and topical treatment, and it was not for that
the inexplicable paths of destiny made me president of the Republic. We begin
today a life and death war on inflation. The decision is taken. We should now
carry it out and win.
Three different metaphors underlie that part of his speech, namely inflation is
a disease, life is a journey and lowering inflation is a war. the journey
metaphor is used to refer to his unexpected ascendance to the presidency, as he

was only the vice-president in the presidential ticket. Two different metaphors for
inflation are put in play, one drawing on disease and the other on war. It did not
seem to cause confusion to invoke two separate domains to deal with inflation,
and these two domains were used together repeatedly by different speakers over
the course of the duration of the plan.
In the next excerpt, Sarney introduces what was arguably the main figure of
the Cruzado Plan, the fiscal de preços [price supervisor], later dubbed fiscal do
Sarney ‘Sarney’s supervisor’:
This program’s success does not lie in an executive order. We are all mobilized in
this fight. Each Brazilian will be a price supervisor, a supervisor for the president,
for the correct execution of the program in all corners of Brazil.
These informal supervisors were ordinary people who were entrusted with the
task of enforcing the price freeze. Their job was to check prices in supermar-
kets, greengrocers, butcher shops, hotels, restaurants, etc. to see if the price
freeze was being upheld. If not, they could either report them to the police or to
Sunab, the government watchdog responsible for price indexing, or take mat-
ters in their own hands and close down the establishment! The very notion of
such supervisors seems to be rooted in a metaphor such as the population
is a police force, with individual citizens mapping onto police officers, store
managers onto criminals, stores themselves onto criminal territory, and official
price indexes onto the law.
Several incidents were recorded where ordinary citizens closed down su-
permarkets which had raised prices overnight. One of the most conspicuous
involved a person named Omar Marczynski, who was caught on camera shut-
ting down a supermarket in southern Brazil; he delivered the following words as
he closed the doors to the store: “I’m taking this over on behalf of José Sarney,
our president and president of the New Republic. It’s closed down on behalf of
the people.”
Such words resonate with calls by revolutionaries as they took over private
property in communist revolutions. Although the word “revolution” was seldom
used to refer to actions by Plano Cruzado supporters, their actions seem to rest
on the metaphor plano cruzado is a popular revolution.
Mr. Marczynski later wrote a piece for the weekly magazine Veja (March 12,
1986), where he described the rationale for his actions:
Acting on impulse and by civic duty, I cried out and showed everyone there that,
one day after the freeze, we were being ripped off and, what’s more, we couldn’t
ignore the call by president Sarney and his ministers to supervise prices.
The feeling of “being robbed” [store managers are thieves] was widespread.
To give an idea of the scope of price hikes, a fast food chain raised the price
of soda from 3,000 to 10,000 Cruzados on one day. Informal price supervisors
found that out and forced it to shut down, but employees refused, violence broke
out and the store was destroyed.
Another key element in the plan was the tabela de conversão, a table prepared
by the administration with figures to be used for converting future payments
into Cruzados, the new currency. The table was inspired by the tablita, a similar
instrument devised in Argentina to keep prices under control. It was distributed
widely in newspapers and magazines, and the population was urged to carry
them as if they were identity cards. Conversion figures were quite complex, and
calculators were needed to do the maths, which led to record sales of pocket
calculators. These tables fitted well within the source domain of police force,
as they represented another piece of legislation requiring enforcement.
The president’s approval rating reached a record high of 91%, still unmatched,
during the brief time when inflation was low.
Reaction in the press was largely favorable. Veja (March 5, 1986) argued in
favor of the plan as follows:
[the] decree signed on February 28 in Brası́lia provides a good number of reasons
that are both concrete and coherent to support the way chosen by the admin-
istration in the fight against the runaway inflation that had poisoned Brazilian
life.
The text invokes a different version of the inflation is a disease metaphor,

namely inflation is poison, with the country serving as the patient, and by
inference, the administration as the doctor and the plan as the medical treatment.
The Cruzado Plan was not successful, though, and inflation (measured by
the Consumer Price Index, IPCA) slowly crept up from −.11% in March 1986
to 3.55% in August. Product and fuel shortages were common, with consumers
having to line up for long periods of time to buy staple food. Some goods were
only found on the parallel market, at much higher prices; the ágio [the difference
between the official retail price and the market price] was soon consolidated as
a normal practice in most businesses. In November, 1986, inflation had already
reached 5.45%, which prompted scathing criticism in the press. Affonso Pastore
(Folha de S. Paulo, December 28, 1986), a leading economist, wrote:
The Cruzado Plan is dead. Its death certificate includes something to the effect
of ‘generalized inflationary infection affecting all vital organs, accelerating the
spread of metastatic indexation lesion’, the same indexation tumor that was bril-
liantly removed by surgery on February 28. But analysis of medical records, from
surgery to death, as well as the patient’s autopsy, all demonstrate that such dis-
eases were not caused by the economic organism. They derived from countless
medical errors incurred in the postsurgical period.
The text is based on the metaphor inflation is an infection, a twist on the

usual inflation is a disease, and on indexation is a tumor, with the plan
as the patient and the administration as the medical team. It also condemns the
administration and construes the failed plan as medical malpractice, suggesting
that in truth the country never fully recovered from surgery. Interestingly, we may
infer that economists and pundits in general are autopsy surgeons, delivering
the post mortem results that identified the causes of failure.
A second version of the plan was launched on November 21, 1986, and
became known as Plano Cruzado II, which basically raised prices and taxes,
in an attempt to reduce demand and increase federal revenue. It did not curb
inflation, which rose to 16% in March. Symptomatically, the president called
for the end of the era of the price supervisors, and a return to a more “rational”
style of politics. The role of metaphors in the public narrative on the economy
seemed to have been more marginal during this period.
A third version, named the Bresser plan, after the chief economist in the
administration, minister Bresser Pereira, was released inApril, 1987. It consisted
of freezes on prices, salaries and rent, and replaced the OTN indexation currency
with a different one, UPR. It also eliminated the WageTrigger of the first Cruzado
Plan: Another key metaphor had been stripped away. The plan almost had the
opposite effect, as inflation reached a peak of 21% in May.
In the meantime, a new constitution for the country was being drafted by a
Constitutional Assembly headed by Ulysses Guimarães. The previous constitu-
tion had been passed by the military in 1967, and therefore there was a feeling
that a full return to democracy should contemplate a new constitution. The new
constitution became known in political circles and in the press as constituição
cidadã [citizen constitution], thus personifying the constitution as a citizen.
In an effort to protect liberties that were violated during the military regime, the
new constitution was seen by many as being too lenient on prison terms and on
enforcing existing legislation. In addition, it tried to regulate a broad range of
themes, some of which could have been dealt with in ordinary legislation. All
that caused what has been described as engessamento [casting a limb in plas-
ter]: budget provisions are plaster, the budget is a person of the federal
budget.
The new constitution promoted sweeping changes in the country, including
a new tax structure. This new structure is still criticized for being extremely
complex and ultimately generating an efeito cascata [waterfall effect] in the
fiscal system. The waterfall metaphor conveys an image of a massive amount
of liquid (taxes; money is liquid) coming down from the top and splashing
over a river or lake, thus enlarging the flow of water (total taxes) running at
the bottom of the waterfall. In this image, the consumer will ultimately pay
higher taxes because of a successive stream of taxes being charged on top of
each other. The most emblematic of these newly introduced taxes is the ICMS
(Merchandise Circulation Tax), which combines dozens of different tariffs, all
applicable on top of highly taxed goods. The negative effects of the whole new
taxation scheme would not be felt for years, perhaps because of the effect of
inflation on public accounts.
Throughout 1988, a new plan was put in place, known as Polı́tica do Feijão
com Arroz [Rice and Beans Policy], in a reference to the everyday dish served
around the country (cooked rice and beans). The intention was for the plan to be a
commonsense solution to the inflation problem. Underlying metaphors include
good is commonsense and running the economy is cooking a simple
recipe, and since rice and beans are eaten everyday, running the economy
is a simple everyday task. Its ambitions were rather low, aiming at keeping
inflation at “just” 15% per month, but it failed at that, and inflation went from
18% in January to 28% in December.
1989 started with yet a new plan: Plano Cruzado Novo [New Cruzado Plan],
which introduced a new currency, the New Cruzado, worth 1,000 times more
than its predecessor, the Cruzado. It was also known as Plano Verão [Summer
Plan], so named because it was launched during the summer of 1989. As that
was an election year, the plan was perceived to have electoral intentions. It
consisted of both salary and price freezes, drastic cuts in government spending
to reduce public debt, privatization of government-run companies, replacing the
“Cruzado” currency with the “New Cruzado”, worth 1,000 times more than its
predecessor. Its main aim was reducing inflation, as there was a widespread fear
that the country was heading for hyperinflation. It also did away with automatic
monetary adjustments correção monetária, a system whereby bank accounts
were credited with interest on a daily basis based on the previous day’s inflation
figures; this was considered on the one hand a safeguard against the loss of
purchasing power brought about by inflation, but on the other, a mechanism
that fueled inflation by constantly eroding the value of currency. The plan also
introduced the concept of the Pacto Social [Social Pact], a group formed by
members from the federal administration, companies and labor union leaders,
whose goal was to keep ongoing negotiations on prices and wages.
The plan was launched through a speech by president José Sarney on national
television, in which he evoked a range of different metaphors to support the
plan, centered around domains of building and fire. The excerpt below is
representative of these two domains being intertwined.
We were on the eve of hyperinflation. Without the decisions taken today, inflation
could reach 1500% per year. And no State had its institutions preserved in a
situation like that. In all countries in which this process failed to be halted, the
economy was destroyed, institutions shattered, in a fire that ran fast. We couldn’t,
therefore, lose all we built. That is why I am not presenting an economic program.
I am rallying the people behind a common effort of national salvation. This will
take sacrifice, relinquishment. So that we don’t have blood and tears, we must
have sweat and sacrifice.
Here he used several distinct metaphors: “On the eve of hyperinflation” suggests
hyperinflation is a date, and the alleged imminent threats to the economy
point to economy is an object and economy is a fragile possession. The
reference to the fire signal economic turmoil is a fire. The president then
claims that he was not presenting an economic plan but rallying the people
to take part in a common effort to save the country (saving the economy
is a national effort). But he warns that such effort will demand courage,
because it takes sweat and sacrifice to avoid blood and tears. This outcome for
action metonymy links to metaphors of both national reconstruction (sweat and
sacrifice being related to economy is a building) and destruction (blood and
tears, a broken economy is a building on fire).
Reaction to the plan was negative, as the population was skeptical of yet
another failed attempt at macro-economical engineering. Labor unions demon-
strated around the country, with slogans such as Choque verão = Bateau Mouche
para todo mundo [Summer Shock = Bateau Mouche for everyone]This was a
reference to the sinking of a tourist boat (Bateau Mouche) in Rio de Janeiro on
New Year’s Eve leaving 150 dead, and the metaphor is a bad economic plan
is a sinking ship.
Reaction in the press was not much different. Veja, in its edition of January
25, 1989, sounded its criticism of the plan with a mixture of different metaphors,
illustrated by the excerpt below.
Scalded by two economic plans in which they were asked to tighten their belts
and take the co-pilot’s seat, only to discover, on the brink of disaster, that the
commander was gone, the Brazilian crew was reluctant to board the plan. The
first week of new economic measures showed that Brazilians are eager to learn
the full details of the package, and no longer agree to wear the outfit of monetary
authority which they were dressed in during the Cruzado Plan and, briefly, during
the Bresser Plan. (Veja, January 25, 1989, p.32).
The text speaks of Brazilians being scalded by two economic plans, a reference
to the effects of high heat (the summer plan is a source of dangerous
heat), the heat itself being the problems caused by the plan. Brazilians were
being invited to tighten their belts (reducing one’s income is tightening
one’s belt) and take the co-pilot’s seat (running the economy is flying an
airplane / steering a ship), only to find out that at the brink of disaster (a bad
economy is a falling airplane / sinking ship), the commander vanished
(government officials map onto the commanding officer of a plane / ship in the
previous metaphor). The result was that Brazilians refused to board that ship
or plane as a crew member (the people of a country map onto the crew of the
metaphorical plane / ship). The text concludes with the statement that Brazilians
refuse to wear the costume of monetary authority worn during the Cruzado plan
(committing to a cause is wearing an outfit).
The linguistic patterning of plano cruzado in the Corpus Brasileiro in-
cludes collocates such as inflação [inflation], heteredoxo [heterodox], es-
tratégica [strategic], estabilização [stabilization], empresarial [business],
choque [shock], and polı́cia [police]. These suggest that two basic facets of
the plan: Its basic aim, which was to stabilize inflation by heterodox means, and
its procedures, which involved shock treatment and control of business prac-
tices, including resorting to police force. This may point to the metaphor of
economic planning as brute force.
4. Plano Collor [Collor Plan] (1990)
The Summer Plan failed, and inflation soon rose again, reaching a staggering
81% in March 1990. In that same month, President José Sarney stepped down
after five years in office, handing over power to Fernando Collor de Mello, the
first civilian president elected by popular vote in 26 years, after defeating Luı́s
Inácio Lula da Silva in a close election. Soon after being sworn in as president,
Collor launched his ambitious economic plan, officially titled Plano Brasil Novo
[New Brazil Plan] but more commonly known as Plano Collor [Collor Plan].
Collor ran his campaign promoting himself as the Caçador dos Marajás
[Maharajah Hunter]; here maharajahs were understood as public officials who
despite doing very little or no work (as normally attributed to all civil servants),
earned big salaries (an idle high earning public servant is a maharajah).
A key word in his discourse was mordomia, used to refer to perks accompanying
such jobs. It stems from mordomo, a [butler], thus being privileges served by a
butler. The metaphor in this case might be described as a high paying public
office is a mansion, which enables perks to map onto services provided by a
butler, public office itself to map onto butler, and the civil servant to map onto
the owner of or guest at the mansion. This metaphor underpinned his whole
term in office, from his campaign ads and rallies up to his impeachment for
corruption. One of his TV ads went as follows:
I started a crusade that reached the whole country, the hunt for maharajas. You
know, my friend, that public service is not for maharajas (. . . ). Corrupt, loafer
maharajas, these will be shown the door. But these aren’t civil servants; these are
tourists.
He framed his campaign trail as a crusade (a political campaign is a crusade),

from which he derived both the hunt and the maharajah. This is interesting,
because neither hunts nor maharajahs (kings, princes or rulers in India) derive
naturally from the source domain of crusades. Arguably, very few Brazilians
were aware of the literal meaning of maharajah, and the meaning of the word in
Brazilian Portuguese is still largely figurative, denoting a rich person in general
or a highly paid civil servant. The mixture of sources is compounded by the
fact that he likened public sector maharajahs to tourists, which seems to rest on
the metaphor a high paying public sector job is a tourist trip. This in turn
allows a high earning public servant to map onto a tourist, and entails working
in the public sector is going on vacation.
The Collor Plan was announced on TV and radio at 7 in the morning of
March 16, 1990, by the president himself. The announcement comprised three
different blocks, each detailed as a set of points. The strategy seemed to be to try
and emulate a lesson, which in itself rested on metaphors such as presenting
an economic plan is teaching a lesson, good is easy and making a sub-
ject easy is numbering its parts. The main block was named Saneamento
Moral [Moral Sanitation], which rested on a metaphor such as immorality is
filth. Morality in this case actually referred to business practices that were
frowned upon, including raising prices and withholding stocks. Point #1 was
Abuso Econômico [Economic Abuse], and included measures such as fixing
five-year jail terms for managers, directors and business owners convicted of
“abusing power”. Other points established punishment for other ‘abusers’ such
as public servants and the extinction of mordomias. The emphasis on jail terms
rested on the metaphor of running the economy is running a police force.
He closed his speech as follows: “We have no alternative. Brazil cannot take
any more defeats. It is now win or win. So help us God”.
Two different metaphors were invoked, one from the field of sports (fixing
the economy is playing sports) and one from religion (fixing the economy
is a religious mission).
Its most striking measure was known as confisco da poupança [savings
takeover], by which the administration seized all savings accounts balances ex-
ceeding 50 thousand cruzeiros. These were put in special accounts earning some
interest and could only be withdrawn after months. However, this only worked in
fact for ordinary citizens, since corporations, politicians, executives, lawyers and
other rich individuals managed to cash out their accounts and invest elsewhere.
Reaction in the press was largely positive at first, with several leading
economists commenting on the need to act quickly to avoid economic melt-
down. Below is an excerpt of an op-ed published by Marcos Cintra in Folha de
S. Paulo on March 3, 1990:
The economy was totally taken over by inflationary disease. There was no way
to avoid systemic forms of treatment, the only ones capable of reaching all sick
cells in the economic organism. Amputations, sedatives, anti-inflammatories, and
other forms of heterodox therapy are effective only as an adjuvant. Cure will come
at the moment when medicines are injected into the bloodstream of the economy.
The main metaphors here are inflation is a disease and economy is an or-
ganism. The economic plan maps onto the medicine, the administration onto
the doctor, and the economy onto the patient. It is argued that the best treatment
for this disease is the Collor Plan, which is metaphorized as an intravenous
medicine, a more effective form of treatment compared to the other options
mentioned. These other drastic forms of treatment such as amputation are dis-
credited, the presupposition being that they had been tried before, they did not
work and left terrible sequels.
Similarly, Roberto Macedo also praised the plan in another op-ed published
on the same day, using the same metaphor of the inflation as a disease:
For its reach, depth and internal coherence, the stabilization plan announced
Friday is the best one I’ve seen put together in Brazil. It is not your usual price
freeze anesthetic: it goes all the way down to fiscal adjustment surgery and to a
squeeze on liquidity. As it does so, it alleviates the problem of internal debt.
Inflation did decrease sharply at first, from 82% in March 1990 to 7.6% in May
but rose again to 20% in February 1991. In 1992, it remained in the 20’s every
month all year long. In 1991, Collor was accused of corruption and influence
peddling and faced impeachment proceedings. He was convicted in the House of
Representatives and resigned office before the vote in the Senate took place. The
vice-president, Itamar Franco, took office on December 29, 1992 and serve the
remainder of Collor’s term until January 1, 1995. During that period, inflation
climbed steadily to 47% in June, 1994, but plunged to 6.8% in July, as a result
of Plano Real.
As far as linguistic patterns, expressions formed with plano collor in the Cor-
pus Brasileiro are too few to be of significance, but in the Corpus do Português
there are 31 instances. Collocates include fé [faith] (economy is religion),
enxugamento [drying] (money is liquid), and herança [inheritance] (conse-
quences are heirloom), which do not offer as clear a linguistic picture as the
Cruzado Plan. Collor, on the other hand, has a negative prosody, collocating
mainly with corrupção [corruption], envolvimento [involvement and impeach-

ment], which might suggest the metaphor of the president as a crook.
5. Plano Real ‘Real Plan’ (1994)
The Plano Real (Real Plan) was launched during Itamar Franco’s term, and its
mentor was Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Itamar’s Finance minister, who would
later become a two-term president. Unlike the Cruzado and the other plans that
followed it, the Real was not launched in its entirety on a single day. Rather, it
was released in phases over a period of months. In August 1993, the groundwork
for the plan was laid out with the introduction of a new temporary currency, the
Cruzeiro Real. In February and March 1994, legislation was passed that created
a conversion unit (URV) pegged to the US dollar (which would later become
the Real currency), as well as an Emergency Fund that appropriated funds from
the federal budget to help the administration handle emergency expenditures.
Finally, in June 1994, the definitive new currency, the Real (still in use today)
came into effect.
The Real Plan was successful in lowering inflation and keeping it within
reasonable limits. In 1994, the annual rate was 916%, still high as a result of
the months preceding the launch of the new currency. 1995 saw an annual rate
of 22%, which declined to 9% in 1996, 5% in 1997, 1% in 1998, with the last
full index at 4% for 2009. The highest figure up to the present (2010) was 12%
in 2002.
The plan was announced on May 19, 1993, and all TV networks ran special
reports on how it was going to be executed. One of these reports included the
following:
This afternoon, the announcement of the plan confirms: This time around there
will be no surprises, no takeover, no freezing, they will keep off people’s savings
accounts, there will be no tablita. As the Finance Minister himself puts it, this
time there is a process going on, one that is just beginning and in order for it
to work out, it will take support from congress and voluntary participation from
society. The greatest difference with this plan is that it did not have a D-day,
nothing came into effect today, by decree, automatically.
This suggests that one of the premises of the plan was then that previous initia-
tives took society by surprise (an economic plan is a bad surprise), unlike
the current one, which would be implemented in stages (good is slow), openly
(an economic plan is a container, good is open) with participation from
Congress, the press and society in general. By referring to a lack of a D-day, it
also suggests the Real plan was not a war effort (an economic plan is a war
plan). The plan tried to build this image of a rational initiative, headed by intel-
lectuals who took cold headed decisions. So much so that a book criticizing the
plan, written by a top journalist, was entitled cabeças de planilha [Spreadsheet
heads], in reference to the technical team running the plan (Nassif 2007).
In the speech unveiling the plan, Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Car-
doso claimed:
Brazil wants to do something. The hopelessness that is felt here and there and it
may have grown stronger overnight, this hopelessness is not the hopelessness of
someone who does not believe in their country, it is the hopelessness of someone
who is looking upward but can’t see any signs. We’re giving, we’re giving off
some signs here.
Here the minister puts in play two metaphors, namely a bad economy is a bad
feeling and hope is a sign in the sky. Both are used to counteract the feeling
of depression and dismay that prevailed at the time, as a consequence of the bad
results of previous economic plans. He was being very cautious, again not to
equate this new plan with other ones that were launched with much fanfare.
One of the key elements of the plan was the pegging of Real (and its prede-
cessor, the URV) to the US dollar. In Portuguese, this was referred to as âncora
cambial [currency anchoring]. The metaphor of the economy as a body of
water, sees the country as a ship in troubled waters, and the strong currency
being the anchor thrown into the sea to keep the ship stable, so that it will not
run aground or hit the rocks (economic disasters), for example. In January 1999,
when the Real was unpegged, a report in the weekly magazine Veja had the head-
line a âncora virou anzol [the anchor turned into a fish hook], referring to the fact
that a fish hook is too light to serve as an anchoring device. Apart from a reduc-
tion in size, the reason for relating the two objects is obscure, since there was no
apparent intent on the part of the administration of developing some form of cur-
rency hook by letting the currency exchange float (the currency exchange
market is a body of water). Critics claimed the government still manipu-
lated the exchange rate, in what was referred to as “dirty float”, which links to
metaphors such as A government-run market is a dirty body of water.
The plan was successful, dropping inflation and raising the value of the Real;
it was customary to hear people boasting the national currency was worth more
than the (then) mighty US dollar. To help keep prices under control without a
price index, the Itamar administration opened up the economy to imports (the
economy is a container), which was hailed as a good measure (good is open).
When the Real came into the scene, in July 1994, the press was cautious, and
referred to the execution of the plan as a game (making an economic plan
work is a game):
The new currency is in circulation, but the game is not over. The fall of inflation,
economic stabilization and the resumption of progress depend essentially on the
way in which the plan is executed. (Veja, July 6, 1994, p.17).
The then senator Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected president riding on
the success of the plan, defeating Luı́s Inácio Lula da Silva in 1994, and was
re-elected beating Lula again in 1998, both times outright in the first round of
vote.
From 1994 to 2001, the Real came under attack as a number of economic
crises hit the world, including the 1994/1995 Mexican currency crisis, the 1997
Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian ruble crisis, Brazil’s own currency crisis
of 1999, and the 2001 Argentine crisis. During these crises, a frequently used
metaphor was speculative attacks (economy is war) to refer to investors selling
massive amounts of the national currency, aimed at forcing down its value and
urging government to buy back large amounts of currency to keep the exchange
rate stable.
But Lula won the 2002 elections against José Serra, considered an heir to
the Real Plan and to the legacy of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in general. Serra
gained popularity as the Health minister who instituted generic medicines, sold
at much lower prices than their brand name counterparts. The main metaphor
for this was a patent is an object and a patent is a container, which can
be broken, opened up and their contents made available at affordable prices.
The Real was heavily depreciated during the months preceding Lula’s victory,
when the exchange rate reached 3.9 to one US dollar, from 2.7 just a year before
(a 50% devaluation; for comparison purposes, it is at about 1.7 in 2010). The
main reason for this were fears that Lula would implement a far-left agenda
punishing investors and big businesses, in addition to defaulting on the debt.
But as it turned out, his administration has pursued a mainstream approach
to economics, largely following on the footsteps of his neoliberal predecessor.
Lula’s policies include inflation targeting (economy is war, with inflation being
an enemy that must be hit), balance of payment surpluses, an independent Central
Bank, high interest rates and high taxes, all of which were inherited from his rival.
The linguistic patterning relative to plano real in the Corpus Brasileiro are
of two basic kinds: Economic and operational. The economic associations are
formed with nouns such as inflação [inflation], estabilização [stabilization], and
preços [prices], whereas the operational ones have to do with putting the plan
into effect and come about as a result of collocates such as implantação [deploy-
ment], implementação [implementation], and perı́odo [period]. This highlights
some core characteristics of the plan, such as its emphasis on lowering infla-
tion and also the technicalities involved in its execution. This perhaps suggests
the metaphor of economic planning as hard science, which links back to

the “spreadsheet heads” epithet attributed to the economic team behind the
plan.
6. Lula and the post-economic package period (2002–2010)
Luı́s Inácio Lula da Silva, 35th president of the Republic, has served two terms.
He has been a hugely popular president, with approval ratings reaching 80% in
his last year in office (2010). His success is credited to a host of factors. On
the international front, a favorable international scenario, where China plays
an increasingly more prominent role, pushing up the price of commodities that
Brazil exports (ethanol, iron ore, soybeans, etc.), among other factors. On the
domestic front, his administration has broadened antipoverty programs aimed at
spreading the wealth, which started during his predecessor’s term, such as Bolsa
Famı́lia [Family Stipend], a program that pays a monthly sum to families living
below the poverty line (poverty is a deep container). This has been credited
with taking a large section of the population out of poverty (poverty is a lidded
container) and turning them into consumers, which has enlarged the middle
class and boosted the internal market. A key metaphor leading such initiatives
is again wealth is a cake, which dates back to the rapid growing economy of
the military regime. This time, though, the idea was framed as repartir o bolo
[sharing the cake] (which echoes bread braking ceremonies found in different
religions). In this metaphor, the administration takes on the role of the owner of
the cake, and the population, of the guests coming to partake of the food, and
the message is one of kindness and compassion, not of greed and self-interest.
Lula has enacted two economic plans, known as PAC 1 and 2 Plano de
Aceleração do Crescimento [Growth Accelaration Program]. On January 22,
2007, the president announced the first pac:
The challenge now is to speed up economic growth (. . . ). Above all, it is time
now to knock down barriers and overcome limits. (. . . ) To grow right is to grow
reducing inequalities between people and regions, to grow sharing wealth, knowl-
edge and quality of life. To grow at a fast pace is to pull out the stops and set the
country going at a pace compatible with its capacities and strengths.
Here, he evokes metaphors of the government as nurturant parent (Lakoff

2002), inequalities,wealth,knowledge, and quality of life as an object,
and of development as a journey, where difficulties to economic growth are
impediments in the journey. Implicit in the wealth metaphor is an allusion to
cake sharing, mentioned earlier; hence the object in question is one that can be
partitioned and enjoyed by many.
Nevertheless, successful policies do not speak for themselves, rather they

need a public discourse to rally public support behind them. As it turns out, Lula
himself has been a major player in building popular confidence in his policies.
Despite having had little education (he dropped out of school at an early age),
he is considered a gifted speaker, who is able to speak informally and in an
engaging manner especially well with those in the lower ranks of the social
pyramid. And one of his most successful tools has been metaphors, so much so
that they have become one of his trademarks. The press soon picked up on that,
and ran several stories featuring his metaphors. One of these turned up on TV
during the time in which the presidency was on the market for a new presidential
airplane. According to one report, one of Lula’s main requirements was cargo
space large enough to carry his metaphors with him on his trips around the
world.
There are countless instances of metaphors in Lula’s discourse, stretching
back to the time when he was a presidential candidate, all the way up to his
years in the presidency. When he was running for his first term, he was asked to
explain the change in his discourse, from far-left to more centrist, which he did
as follows:
I changed. Brazil changed. (. . . ) With PT [Worker’s Party] it is the same thing.

The party has become more mature year after year. Do you think your father treats
his grandchildren better than his children because he did not like his children?
No. It is because he has matured.
Here, he refers to the country as a family, with him being a mature kind
grandfather, and the population his grandchildren. In the Portuguese original,
the word for “mature” is [ripe], hence a person/political party is a fruit,
and good is ripe.
In 2005, both his party and his administration got caught in corruption
charges, in what was termed Escândalo do Mensalão [Paycheck Scandal]. This
is in reference to alleged bribe money paid to congressmen on a monthly basis
in exchange for votes on legislation submitted by the administration. Several
congressional hearings took place, all broadcast on national TV, but the presi-
dent was never indicted. In fact, his ratings remained high, which earned him the
designation the “Teflon President” (immunity is non-stick coating). Pundits
predicted that he might even face an impeachment trial, and as such predic-
tions proved wrong, the situation was described in terms of metaphorical heavy
armoring. The president was depicted as blindado [being armored], which
also made reference to the metaphor of politics as warfare, with corruption
charges being ammunition and his charisma as thick armoring protecting him
from attack. His closest and long-time ally José Dirceu resigned due to corrup-
tion charges, thus forcing president Lula to explain whether he truly did not
know such wrong-doing was taking place right within the presidential palace.
His answer was simply that he did not, just as parents cannot keep track of every-
thing that goes on in their household all the time, including what their children
are doing in their bedrooms just a few feet away from them. Here, the metaphor
of government as a big family is evoked, with the president as the trusting
father who has far too much work to do to find time to check on each one of
their children (cabinet ministers). Just as good willing parents are sometimes
betrayed by their children, so was the president.
His campaign for re-election was run amidst the corruption scandal, and
one of his ads included the slogan deixa o homem trabalhar [let the guy work].
This ties back with the government as family but perhaps specifies the source
domain as a working family, where the president is a busy working man who
knows better than to waste time on nagging remarks that just take him away
from his many duties.
His opponent was Geraldo Alckmin, then governor of São Paulo, the rich-
est industrial state in the union. Alckmin is by no means as gifted a speaker
as Lula, preferring a distanced and factual style, which many considered un-
appealing; he was branded a “bulletpoint speaker”, and his lack of charisma
earned him the nickname picolé de chuchu [chayote popsicle] (a political
candidate is food), because of the bland taste of chayote (charisma is tasty
food). Berber Sardinha (2007) looked at metaphors used by both candidates in
two key televised debates preceding the runoff of that election, and found that
both used similar amounts of metaphors. There were, however, important differ-
ences between the two candidates. Firstly, Lula re-used more of his opponent’s
metaphors, with only 40% of all his metaphors being unique to him, against
60% for Alckmin. Secondly, as far as individual metaphors put in play in the
debates, the single most frequent one was the economy is an organism, with
Lula resorting to it significantly 13% more often. Other frequent metaphors for
the economy were orientational, such as good is down, good is big, good is
up, and less commonly structural ones such as the economy is a building,
the economy is a liquid, and the economy is a container. The frequency
of use of these metaphors was statistically different between the two candidates.
Lula was particularly strong on conceptualizing the economy as an organism
(typically reassuring voters that the economy will grow faster) and on talking
about particular points of his administration’s record on the economy as good
is big (“big economy”, “large sections of the work force”, “large budget for
agriculture”, etc.) and good is up (salaries, pensions and minimum wage going
up). Alckmin, on the other hand, favored primarily good is down (generally
referring to lowering taxes and decreasing the number of ministerial jobs). This
may have created a pessimistic image for Alckmin, because a downward direc-
tion is not normally regarded as desirable, despite the fact that some consider
the topics talked about by means of that metaphor (lowering taxes, for instance)
sound economic policy. Lula, on the other hand, may have come across as more
optimistic, trying to share with the electorate his confidence that the economy
would follow an upward trend.
When questioned about the low rate of economic growth during his first
term, Lula tried to appease his critics with a metaphor that made headlines:
There’s a lot to do in Brazil . . . but every now and then I ask for patience, because
there’s a lot of people out there who’re in a hurry. You may have noticed that when
you go to a churrascaria [all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant] to eat rodı́zio [the
meats are brought to the table on large skewers], there’s that guy who’s in a rush
who’ll have all the mayo that comes around, all the sausages that come around.
But when the best meats come, he’s already stuffed himself full and won’t have
the sirloin, the ribs, the cuts. . . We need to control our anxiety. . .
The metaphor is deceptively complex. He brings up a range of metaphors such

as life as a dubious restaurant, patience as hunger and wisdom is pa-
tience. The meal in question is a well-known ritual in Brazil, and some rodı́zio
restaurants are known to resort to such tactics as Lula alluded to in order to save
money. The restaurant in the metaphor maps onto behavior allegedly encouraged
by the opposition, whose real intentions are to treat customers (the people of
the country) unfairly for political gain. The metaphor serves as both a warning
against opposition parties whose opinions may in fact harm the population, by
rushing them into action that may work against their best interest in the long run.
A similar metaphor was employed later on in 2010, when the president was
criticized for what was perceived as slow preparations for both the World Cup
and the Olympic Games, which Brazil will host in 2014 and 2016, respectively.
Lula replied that “some people want us to eat the porridge before it is ready”,
and that they should remember that when you cook porridge, you may burn
your hand with the splatter that comes out of the pan as you stir (impatience is
badly prepared porridge).
These deliberate metaphors do not account for the majority of the metaphors
regularly employed by Lula, though. They are important markers of style and as
devices that make headlines, but the thrust of his communicative power can be
found in conventionalized metaphors repeated on a daily basis. Berber Sardinha
(2008) looked at a large corpus of presidential speeches and talks from his first
term, and found that Lula exploited metaphors of conquest for a wide range of
topics. These include individual and social rights and freedoms, independence,
credibility, democracy and respect. Importantly, these metaphors resonate with
the personal narrative of the president, who “conquered a better life” work-
ing his way out of poverty and becoming the first blue collar president of the
country.
The housing market crisis did affect Brazil, and in 2009 GDP fell by .2%
after a 5.1% growth in the previous year. The president had predicted that the
crisis would not hit the country, though, and assuaged the markets by drawing on
the tsunami metaphor (an economic crisis is a natural disaster) that was
usual in describing the housing market collapse (financial markets are
buildings) and referred to its effects in Brazil as merely as a ripple marolinha:
“Over there [in the USA], it is a tsunami; over her, if it ever gets here, it will be
a little ripple that you can’t even ride”.
Lula has seized the opportunity to condemn developed countries for the
current economic crisis. In a controversial statement, he claimed it was caused by
“white blue-eyed people who knew all before the crisis and now know nothing”.
This opposes peoples whose eyes are fair to those whose eyes are dark. This
then translates into a metonymical chain that includes eye color for skin
color, skin color for race, race for country, country for economy
and economy for political power, allowing particular countries to intervene
economically in others. This ties back to resentment from years of intervention
by the International Monetary Fund, which used to be seen by many in Brazil
as a representative of oppressive regimes.
The international community has generally seen Brazil in recent years as
a rising power. Several reports have been run in the international press about
what is typically described as an economic boom. The Economist, for instance,
in its edition of November 2009 printed a cover story entitled “Brazil takes
off” (good is up, a country is a rocket), which includes the following ex-
cerpt:
Under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade-union leader
born in poverty, its government has moved to reduce the searing inequalities that
have long disfigured it. Indeed, when it comes to smart social policy and boosting
consumption at home, the developing world has much more to learn from Brazil
than from China. In short, Brazil suddenly seems to have made an entrance onto
the world stage.
Here, a range of different metaphors are called upon to describe the country’s
economy: hot is bad (“searing inequalities”); a country is a person and so-
cial problems are serious accidents (“inequalities that . . . disfigured it”);
comsumption is a rocket (“boosting consumption”); a country is a teacher
(“the developing world has much to learn”); the developing world is a stage
(“the developing world has much more to learn from Brazil”), mapping coun-
tries to actors, the economy to a play, and a good economy to a part in the
play.
Critics warn, though, that such optimistic forecasts have been seen before,
but all the same the country squandered its chances to grow at high rates over
sustained periods of time. A metaphor that is commonly used to refer to missing
opportunities in Brazil is perder o bonde [literally, miss the cable car], as in the
excerpt below, written by Rubens Barbosa, a top official with São Paulo State’s
Industrial Federation:
It’s crucial that, through government actions, especially from 2011 on, and from
now on as far as the private sector and its investments, Brazil does not lag behind
in the technological race under way. We run the risk of, once again, missing the
cable car of History. (Estado de S. Paulo, January 26, 2010).
Here, the metaphor of history as a journey underlies the author’s claims of the
risks of delaying investments in technology infrastructure. Another metaphor
present in the excerpt is opportunity is a cable car, where countries are
personified as passengers.
As the economy grows more stable, the country’s unfair tax structure has
come under constant scrutiny. The press has been pushing for fiscal reform in
an attempt to lower taxes, but despite mounting evidence that the carga tributária
[tax burden] (taxes are heavy burdens) is too high (at 37.5% of GDP) for
the poor public services offered in return, the majority of the population has
not embraced this idea yet. Among other factors, this may have to do with
the metaphor for tax payer in Brazil, which is contribuinte [contributor]. Ar-
guably, the concept of a contributor rests on good is contributing, in contrast
to payer, which links to bad is paying. Corpus data seem to back this up, as
the top collocates of “contribute” include “development”, “understanding” and
“knowledge”, whereas “pay” collocates more frequently with “costs”, “rent”
and “bills” (British National Corpus on corpus.byu.edu/bnc/). Similarly, in Por-
tuguese (Corpus Brasileiro, corpusbrasileiro.pucsp.br), contribuir [contribute]
collocates primarily with desenvolvimento [development], melhoria [improve-
ment], and qualidade [quality], whereas pagar [pay] co-occurs mostly with
preço [price], contas [bills], and escola [school] (referring to private school
fees).
As far as lexicogramatical patterns, neither corpus provided enough evidence
of pac; Lula, on the other hand, was represented, and its main collocates center
around the election candidate [candidate], campanha [campaign], candidature
[candidature], vitória [victory], eleição [election], programa [program], and his
administration governo [government], plano [plan]. These are very factual and
seem to portray him simply as a victorious candidate.
7. Conclusion
The last half-century of Brazilian economics have been dominated in general

by a desire to plan the economy, and more specifically by a struggle to defeat
inflation (cf. Baer 2008). Politics has followed suit, as a number of presidents
have dedicated their political capital to these efforts. More recently, though, after
reaching success on the inflationary front, the country has turned its attention to
different issues such as growth, income distribution and tax reform. Formidable
challenges lie ahead.
Major economic plans have been underpinned by metaphors, the most mem-
orable of which have been discussed in this chapter. These metaphors may be
considered framing devices. Framing metaphors are those that seem to have
stood the test of time; they refer to a theory, mindset or commonsense solutions
that have characterized the dominant approach to economic issues in a given
time. Not necessarily academic, they have entered the public narrative via the
media, and include the economic miracle of the early 1970’s, the cake rising ap-
proach to income growth and distribution, the salary squeeze policy on wages,
and the inflation dragon/beasts threatening salaries and savings. By contrast, a
wide range of ancillary metaphors have been deployed to describe economic
problems and solutions. They do not seem as powerful as framing ones. Some
were identified in the excerpts, and include seeing shock therapy as a cure for
inflation, an economy as open or closed to international trade, and having a
rice-and-beans meal approach to economics, among others.
It is hard to imagine such large-scale initiatives becoming popular or even
plausible without major framing metaphors accompanying them. In the Brazilian
economy, the past has been abundant with metaphors. As the country enters a
new era, with a stable economy, the question remains whether new thought-and-
action framing metaphors will make the scene, and what their role will be in
relation to their predecessors. If the past is anything to go by, in Brazil the future
looks bright on the metaphorical front.
References
Baer, Werner
2008 The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development (6th ed.). Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Berber Sardinha, Tony
2007 Metáforas de Lula e Alckmin nos debates de 2006 em uma perspec-
tiva da Linguı́stica de Corpus [Lula’s and Alckmin’s metaphors at the
2006 detates in a corpus linguistic perspective]. Revista Brasileira de
Lingüı́stica Aplicada 27 (1): 139–164.
Berber Sardinha, Tony

2008 Lula e a metáfora da conquista [Lula and the conquest metaphor].
Linguagem em (Dis)curso 8 (1): 93–120.
Cysne, Rubens P.
1993 A economia brasileira no perı́odo militar [Brazilian economy during
the military rule]. Estudos Econômicos 23 (2): 185–226.
Gibbs, Raymond W. (ed.)
2008 The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. NewYork: Cam-
Lakoff, George
2002 Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (2nd ed.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nassif, Luı́s
2007 Os Cabeças-de-Planilha. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Ediouro.
O’Dougherty, Maureen
2002 Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-class Daily Life in
Brazil. Durham, N.C. ; London: Duke University Press.
Singer, Paul
2009 Economic evolution and international connection. In Brazil:A Century
of Change, Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro
(eds.), 55–100. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Souza, Angelita Matos
2009 Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol: Estado e Economia no Brasil [God
and the Devil in the Land of the Sun: State and Economy in Brazil].
São Paulo, SP: Anablume.
Warburton, Nigel
2007 Thinking from A to Z (3rd ed.). London/New York: Routledge.
Section II
Cultural filters in contrastive studies
Mandarin translation of English economic
metaphors: A cross-linguistic study of conceptually
related economic terms
Siaw-Fong Chung
Abstract
When foreign language speakers use a second or foreign language, they have to process
conceptual models that might be different from their own language. Thus, they are con-
stantly dealing with more than a single conceptual knowledge. The aim of this chapter
is to present the possible consensus and compromise participants were faced with when
they tried to translate economy-related metaphorical keywords. This study employed a
backward translation task that required participants to translate metaphorical keywords
from a source language to their mother tongue. The results showed that in addition to the
effect of ‘equivalent term first’ principle, participants were also influenced by frequency-
effect of the keywords used in the required context in their mother tongue. Sometimes,
the frequency-effect might also overrule the ‘equivalent term first’ principle, a discovery
not discussed in depth previously. This chapter also overcomes difficulties encountered
by most previous translation studies in quantifying translation results through using sys-
tematic analyses of experimental and corpora data.
1. Introduction
In economic discourse, conceptual metaphors (cf. Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and

Johnson 1980) play a crucial role in describing concepts such as the movement
of the market, the economic conditions in a country, and the ups-and-downs
of the stock market. Since these concepts of economy are abstract, concrete
language, usually in the form of metaphors, is needed when describing economic
conditions. Browne and Quinn (1999:134) stated that metaphors in economic
discourse “may be omnipresent, but they will hardly ever be acknowledged or
defended.” One example is liquid metaphors such as cash flow, frozen, and go
down the drain. (See news article by Booth (1994: A18).) To most economic
columnists, being skilled at manipulating metaphors is a necessary component of
strong writing. Regarding foreign language readers, to be able to comprehend
130 Siaw-Fong Chung
the rhetoric of economics in a foreign language is usually taken for granted.

Most non-native readers are expected to acquire an economic register and the
metaphors in it if they need to read articles in the economic genre.
However, the acquiring of metaphors not only involves learning new vocabu-
lary but also involves learning a different culture. For instance, after comparing
Polish and English learners, Deignan, Gabryś, and Solska (1997: 354) postulated
that there are four types of variations between languages concerning metaphors,
given in (1) below.
(1) Variation 1: Same conceptual metaphor and equivalent linguistic expres-

sion.
Variation 2: Same conceptual metaphor but different linguistic expression.
Variation 3: Different conceptual metaphors used.
Variation 4: Words and expressions with similar literal meanings but dif-
ferent metaphorical meanings
The aim of postulating these variations was to capture the learning difficulties en-
countered by foreign language learners of a target language. Nonetheless, it was
discovered that an equivalent expression from the same conceptual metaphor
might still not be chosen by a translator due to many factors such as collocations
and the overpowering of frequency effect (e.g., the prevailing sayings about the
ups or downs of the economy in a certain language). As Huang, Chung, and
Ahrens (2006) have suggested that different languages might form different
knowledge systems when metaphors are concerned. Whether or not a similar
or different knowledge system will be activated during translating economic
metaphors has not been discussed in great details in the past. This paper, there-
fore, employs a translation task, followed by a goodness-of-answer rating task,
i.e., a measurement involving participants’ rating on the goodness of answers
given (cf. prototypes and categories in Ungerer and Schmid (2006)), to inspect
the choice of translators in backward translation (L2 to L1). In addition, unlike
most cross-cultural translation studies which tended to explain cultural differ-
ences based on descriptive data (because open-ended translation data are hard
to be quantified), this study utilizes a corpus linguistic analysis of the translated
keywords through which several translation mechanisms are proposed. In the
section below, we first discuss previous studies which have dealt with economy
metaphors. By doing so, we also explain our choice of materials which will be
discussed in Section 3.
Mandarin translation of English economic metaphors 131
2. Economy Metaphors
Corpus-based studies concerning metaphors in economic discourse have been

expanding rapidly in recent years, among which are: the Spanish-English stock
market study by Charteris-Black and Ennis (2001); the comparisons of market
metaphors in Mandarin, Malay, and English by Chung (2008); the study on
German-English metaphors in euro trading by Charteris-Black and Musolff
(2003); the investigation of press attitudes toward the introduction of the euro
in 1999 in Britain and in Italy by Semino (2002); and the analysis of money
and finance metaphors by O’Connor (1998). Most of these studies intended to
unveil cross-linguistic variations by identifying features such as common versus
specific use. For instance, Semino found that the British used locked against and
one-size-fits-all clothes to reflect their attitudes when referring to the launch of
the euro in 1999, while the Italians used christening, journey, sport, and exam
to refer to the same event. On the other hand, some studies, such as Herrera
(2008) and White and Herrera (2009), investigated the features of metaphors,
such as syntactic structures, metaphor foci, and source domains, in business
press headlines in Spanish and English. Their results support the view that the
business genre is full of metaphors and these metaphors are highly manipulated,
from the headlines to the body of the texts.
In view of the abundantly found metaphors in economic texts, an immedi-
ate concern is perhaps to question how well non-native readers accommodate
their uses. What kinds of consensus or compromise do these metaphors bring
to readers with a different mother tongue? Many studies mentioned above have
been devoted to examining the use of economic terms cross-linguistically or
for pedagogic purposes. Yet, not many have investigated the translation of eco-
nomic terms by using a backward translation task, a translation task requiring
participants to translate from a target language back to their mother tongue.1
Furthermore, not many studies have measured systematically the conceptual
similarities and differences between two languages using quantitative methods.
This study, hence, will serve as an example of work combining both experimental
and corpus-based measures in the inspection of economic metaphors.
This paper is going to use three conceptual metaphors which are frequently
found in English, namely economy is a building, economy is a person,
and economy is an engine. Among these three conceptual metaphors, many
corpus-based studies (stated above) have discussed economy is a person while
only a small number of studies has inspected economy is an engine (see also
1. Similar use of backward translation task for other purposes has also been used by
Duyck, Depestel, Fias, and Reynvoet (2008) and Olohan (2004).
132 Siaw-Fong Chung
Hodgson (1993) for mechanistic metaphors). Several studies also have examined
economy is a building in general contexts (e.g., Lu and Ahrens (2008), Gong,
Ahrens, and Huang (2007), and Grady (1997)).
As for organism metaphors (a superordinate category of person), in one
study, White (2003) inspected the collocations of ‘growth.’He found instances of
the economy is a living organism and specifically discussed the economy is
a plant, e.g., growth revives, growth withers, growth recovers, fosters growth,
etc., and the economy is an animal or a human, e.g., shoulder growth, birth
of growth, anemic growth, etc. He also noticed the uses of the economy is a
mechanical process (e.g., to fuel growth, overheated growth, and the locomo-
tive of growth). The referring of the economy to mechanisms and machines is
also seen in Boers (2000), who listed expressions such as the economy is over-
heating, the economy is sputtering, the monetary lever has rusted, etc. Boers
also found instances of anemic industries, healthy firms, and economic recov-
ery. Some of these terms (sputtering, anemic, healthy, and recovery) will also
be tested in this study.
These above-mentioned studies show that the conceptual metaphors we se-
lected are prevalent in language use, and readers of the economic genre are likely
to encounter them if these conceptual metaphors appear in economic discourse.
3. Materials
Our materials were designed to explore how speakers of a different mother

tongue (Mandarin) understand English metaphors used to express the econ-
omy.2 In our psycholinguistic experiment, we asked participants to translate
English sentences containing metaphors into Mandarin. Ten metaphorical key-
words describing the economy were embedded in eight sentences adapted from
the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in 1994 and 1995 in order to
ensure authenticity. These sentences with metaphorical keywords in bold are
given in (2) below. (In the questionnaire, the bold font type was removed.)3
2. The purpose of this study was not to test translation skills but rather to discover cross-
linguistic variations, if any, when using similar or different metaphorical keywords
to describe the economy.
3. These sentences were taken from a different experiment in Chung and Ahrens (2004)
using 24 participants from National Taiwan University, with the aim of testing two
different sets of classroom instructions – one group of 12 participants was supplied
with metaphorical mapping and the other group of 12 participants was not. In this
current work, a new group of participants from National Chengchi University was
run in order to test their backward translations of the metaphorical keywords.
(2) Sentences used in the translation experiment:

a. The war in Iraq has caused the collapse of the U.S. economy.
b. It is unsure whether the ailing economy will become as healthy as before.
c. The economy remains anemic since the outburst of the war.
d. The sputtering U.S. economy was reflected in the drop of employment
rate in the past few months.
e. According to economists, the rebuilding of the economy in the U.S. is
expected to take years.
f. “The economy is in a recovery, but this is insufficient to create jobs for
the people who need them,” he said.
g. The economy is operating well and with careful planning, the economy
is expected to heat up in a year’s time.
h. Snow was confident that after the war the newly re-structured economy
would be more stable.
The ten metaphorical keywords in (2) above fall under three main conceptual
metaphors, given in (3) below. There are four keywords for person and three
keywords each for building and for engine.
(3) economy is a building
collapse (2a), rebuilding (2e), re-structured (2h)
economy is a person
ailing (2b), healthy (2b), anemic (2c), recovery (2f)
economy is an engine
sputtering (2d), operating (2g), heat up (2g)
If more than one keyword appears in the same sentence (e.g., (2b) and (2g)),
both keywords must reflect the same conceptual metaphor. The procedures are
provided in Section 4 below.
4. Procedures
A production task was employed whereby participants translated sentences con-

taining economy-related metaphorical keywords into Mandarin. The participants
included 70 undergraduate students (41 females and 29 males) from National
Chengchi University, who voluntarily participated in the experiment upon their
course instructor’s request. One of the participants was removed due to unan-
swered questions reaching 50%; the remaining 69 participants were analyzed.
The average age of the participants was 21 years old (sd = 1.41). A self-report
of language proficiency, on a scale of 1 to 7 with 1 being least proficient and 7
being most proficient, was 6.41 (sd = 0.96) for Mandarin and 3.98 (sd = 1.13)
134 Siaw-Fong Chung
for English. Participants’ English ability was not expected to hinder them from
completing the task. All participants spent no more than 30 minutes to complete
the questionnaire.
Based on the translations from the 69 participants, a goodness-of-answer
rating task was undertaken by three separate raters who are native speakers of
Mandarin. The raters were asked to rate whether the metaphorical keywords
were translated adequately. They rated the translations based on the following
criteria in (4) below, focusing both on semantics and syntax of the keywords.
(4) Rating 5: The keyword was translated correctly and the sentence structure
reflected that of a fluent Mandarin sentence.
Rating 4: The keyword was translated correctly but the sentence structure
did not reflect that of a fluent Mandarin sentence.
Rating 3: The keyword was translated somewhat inadequately in meaning.
Rating 2: The keyword was left out or the keyword was replaced by another
Rating 1: The keyword was translated incorrectly.
The reason for including sentence structure in the consideration of ratings 4
and 5 was to single out participants who used fluent Mandarin from those who
did not, i.e., based on the influence of the English sentence structure. Partici-
pants who translated according to the sentence structure of the source language
demonstrated a feature of translationese (cf. Ellis, 1994) and their translated
sentence structures are worthy of future investigation. (Note that the score of 1
does not equate to a ‘wrong’ translation. The scores merely reflect the soundness
of the translation based on the keywords.)
The following sentences in (5) provide examples of translations with average
high and low scores. Translation of the participants’ Mandarin sentences into
English is provided by the author. See appendix for the Chinese transcription.
The keywords, if they appear in the translation, are in bold. Some participants
provided a good translation of the keywords using fluent sentence structures.
These translations were accorded a high score. (See all (i)’s in (5) below). A
translated term with a low score may range from an inappropriate use of key-
words, e.g., collapse was translated as organization in Mandarin in (5a:ii) to
the change of keywords, e.g., recovery was translated as rebuilding in (5f:ii)
or to an entirely irrelevant sentence (5e:ii). Based on the average ratings, in
what follows, all translated sentences were analyzed according to the rating
scores within and across conceptual metaphors and different keywords, as well
as in comparison to the number of different forms used in translating the same
keywords.
(5) a. The war in Iraq has caused the collapse of the U.S. economy.
i. The Iraq war caused the collapse of the U.S. economy. (5.00)
ii. The cause of Iraq war is the organization of the U.S. economy.
(1.67)
b. It is unsure whether the ailing economy will become as healthy as
before.
i. It is unsure whether such dejected economy will be able to recover
or not. (4.67)
ii. It is unsure whether the recovered economy will be as healthy as
before. (1.67)
i. Since the outburst of the war, economy remains anemic. (5.00)
ii. The economic market is still operating, even during the heat of war.
(1.00)
i. The dysfunction of the U.S. economy can be reflected in the past
few month’s unemployment rate. (4.33)
ii. The economic breakdown/collapse reflects the increase of the past
unemployment rate in the past few months. (1.00)
i. According to economists, the rebuilding of the economy in the U.S.
is expected to take years. (5.00)
ii. Based on the current resources, the United States will seem to be
self-sufficient for many years. (1.67)
i. He said, “The economy is recovering, but the job opportunities are
not enough for the people who need them.” (4.67)
ii. “The economy is rebuilding; however, this does not create enough
job opportunities for the people who need them,” he said. (1.67)
i. The economy is operating well and has careful planning. The econ-
omy is expected to heat up in a year’s time (4.67)
ii. If [the economy] is managed accordingly with a good packaging
system, within a year improvement is expected. (1.67)
136 Siaw-Fong Chung
i. Snow was confident that after the war the newly re-structured econ-
omy would be more stable. (5.00)
ii. Snow was confident towards the after-war newly re-structured
economy to become more stable. (3.33)4
By examining the sentences in (5), it seems easy to claim that whenever there
is an equivalent term available (e.g., collapse, healthy, rebuilding, recovery,
operating, and re-structured), participants tended to select their equivalence
in Mandarin. One can also see that sputtering in (5d) does not seem to have
an equivalent and the better example in (5d:i) used ‘dysfunction’ to refer to
it. Nonetheless, these observations will not take us any further than arriving
at the similar conclusion as Deignan et al. did (presented in (1) previously).
Our aim differs slightly from that as we intend to provide a quantitative mea-
sure of the conceptual similarities and differences. In the section below, we
provide our analysis of the translations by inspecting the data from various di-
mensions, including a discussion of the distribution of ratings versus the three
source domains (person, building and engine), the percentage distributions
of participants using a similar form, as well as finding out the possible factors
affecting the selection of the Mandarin translations by the participants.
5. Results and Discussion
Altogether, there were 660 (95.65%) answered questions out of 690 expected
sentences from the 69 participants (10 sentences per participant), with an average
mean rating of 3.60 (sd = 1.17) for goodness-of-answer ratings (there are 1,980
ratings in total). The distribution of ratings is provided in Figure 1 below. In
Figure 1a, we see that the percentage constituting the rating of 5 is the highest
among the five ratings. This shows that most of the sentences were given a
good and fluent translation. Comparatively, about 20% of the sentences were
given a correct translation of keywords but they were presented in a non-fluent
Mandarin sentence structure (rating 4). A Chi-square test comparing rating 4
and 5 showed a significant effect, 2 (1) = 112.44, p < .05, indicating that most
of the keywords were rated by the participants as a good translation with a fluent
sentence structure.5
When we investigated the ratings versus conceptual metaphors, results in
Figure 1b were obtained. We can see that the rating of 5 predominated building,
4. (5h:ii) is an instance of a translation that preserves the English language structure

(see the Mandarin sentence in the appendix).
5. Chi-square was used here because the ratings were of a nominal scale. Since too many
statistics tests might be involved, we reported only the ones most relevant to our aims.
45.00%
38.38%
40.00%
35.00%
30.00%
25.00% 20.15%
20.00% 17.88%
15.00% 13.13%
10.45%
10.00%
5.00%
0.00%
1 2 3 4 5
Ratings
80.00%
70.00%
60.00%
1
50.00% 2
40.00% 3
30.00% 4
5
20.00%
10.00%
0.00%
building person engine
Figure 1. Distributions of Ratings (1a) versus Conceptual Metaphors (1b).
the rating of 2 predominated person, and the ratings of 1 and 3 predominated

engine, indicating a better translation for building than the other two source
domains.
In order to compare across conceptual metaphors, we calculated the mean
ratings for each group. In Table 1 below, the breakdown according to conceptual
metaphors (column 1) and their keywords (column 2) is presented. Based on
the answers from the 69 participants, the mean ratings and the standard devia-
tions (SDs) for each keyword are given in columns 3 and 4, respectively. The
‘N’ in column 5 represents the number of answers collected. (Some sentences
were left blank.) The percentages of answered questions are given in column 6.
In the final column, the numbers of varied translated forms in Mandarin are
provided.
From Table 1, we can see that re-structured and rebuilding are two keywords
being accorded the highest ratings by the raters, with scores of 4.57 and 4.60, re-
spectively.They also contribute to the high total average for economy is a build-
ing (4.36). In economy is a person, the highest rating comes from recovery
(4.03) and for economy is an engine, it is heat up (3.71). The keywords in the
building domain were better translated than person (3.26) and engine (3.31),
and the difference is significant, F(2, 1979) = 136.38, p < .05, based on a One-
Way anova test, a test comparing means. Person and engine, however, do not
Table 1. Results of Experiment Based on Conceptual Metaphors and Keywords.
138
Conceptual Keywords Mean Standard N % Answered Translated

Metaphors Ratings Deviations Forms
(SDs)
collapse 3.92 0.95 68 98.55 26
building re-structured 4.57 0.54 60 86.96 10

Siaw-Fong Chung
rebuilding 4.60 0.56 69 100.00 5
Total 4.36 0.78 197 285.51 –
ailing 2.55 1.21 68 98.55 37
person anemic 3.26 1.26 66 95.65 44
healthy 3.19 0.86 68 98.55 15
recovery 4.03 1.01 68 98.55 14
Total 3.26 1.21 270 391.30 –
heat up 3.71 0.88 64 92.75 31
engine operating 3.16 1.16 64 92.75 23
sputtering 3.07 1.15 65 94.20 32
Total 3.31 1.11 193 279.71 –

differ from one another.6 From here, we can infer that Mandarin speakers could
provide almost equivalent and fluent translations for economy is a building.
In contrast, the translations for person and engine could present a mixture
of equivalent and non-equivalent translations in Mandarin. For instance, the
participant in (5f:ii) previously chose not to translate the sentences for person
(recovery) using a corresponding keyword in the same domain in Mandarin,
although a same term exists, albeit it was selected by only one-third of the par-
ticipants; instead, this participant resorted to using the Mandarin equivalent of
rebuilding from the building domain. The differing linguistic expressions se-
lected may be due to the communities’ preferred conceptual model in describing
economic status. (See Sections 6 and 7 to follow.)
As can also be seen in Table 1, rebuilding was translated consistently using
five similar forms in Mandarin (see rightmost column). This means that the
Mandarin speakers were able to retrieve the Mandarin equivalent of rebuilding
easily. Re-structured comes second with 10 forms of translated Mandarin.These,
again, prove that economy is a building is a shared conceptual metaphor in
English and in Mandarin. Recovery (14 forms) and healthy (15 forms) also were
centralized in their translation, with an equivalent Mandarin form constituting
one-third of the answers by all the participants. In contrast, ailing (37 forms) and
anemic (44 forms) were translated using various dissimilar words in Mandarin.
When a correlation test was conducted in order to measure the relationship
between the rating scores and the number of translated Mandarin forms for
each English term, the results showed that more types of forms corresponded to
lower rating scores, r = −.733, p < .05, indicating that when the participants were
unable to find an equivalent Mandarin term, they tended to use many different
forms in translation. By contrast, metaphors translated with fewer forms tended
to yield higher rating scores.7
6. In order to compare among the ten keywords, we ran a One-Way anova test. The
results produced a significant effect, F(8, 1979) = 61.427, p < .05, indicating that
there were differences among the keywords. As displayed in the multiple follow-up
post-hoc comparisons among these keywords, rebuilding (4.60) was significantly
different from all other keywords, except re-structured (4.57); ailing (2.55), with
the lowest rating, was also significantly different from all other keywords, except
sputtering (3.07).
7. The rating scores, nonetheless, displayed no relationship with the answered percent-
age, r(8) = −.18, p = .62, meaning the missing cases had no direct relationship with
the scores of the keywords. In other words, the answered question percentages might
not be a result of the difficulty in translating them; rather, they might be a result of
other environmental factors or of the participants themselves.
140 Siaw-Fong Chung
When we investigated the distribution of ratings within the keywords, the

results in Figure 2 were produced. It was found that the translations for collapse,
anemic, rebuilding, recovery, and re-structured have been accorded with higher
percentages of rating 5. The remaining keywords have higher percentages in
the other ratings. Ailing is comparatively higher in 2, healthy is higher in 3,
sputtering is higher in both 3 and 5, and operating is higher in 1, 3, and 5. Based
on our rating criteria in (4) previously, it is not hard to see that those with higher
ratings are likely to possess an equivalent translation in Mandarin while those
with lower ratings might reflect a difficulty in producing equivalent terms.
All the above results prove that different economy-related metaphorical key-
words vary in conceptual relatedness across languages. This is reflected in the
quantitative measures used to display the ease or difficulty the participants ex-
perienced when trying to express these terms in their mother tongue.
80.00%
70.00%
60.00%
1
50.00%
2
40.00% 3
4
30.00% 5
20.00%
10.00%
0.00%
collapse ailing healthy anemic sputtering rebuilding recovery operating re-
structured
Figure 2. Percentages of Ratings within Keywords.
In order to understand further what terms the participants used, in Table 2 below,
we discuss the features of the most frequently appearing terms in the Mandarin
translations. By ‘most frequently appearing terms’, we mean the most frequently
used terms by a majority of the participants in the translation task. The purpose of
discussing this is to see whether a similar or different term was evoked when the
participants were translating the sentences. We thus calculated the percentages
of participants who used a similar term in the experiment.
Column 1 of Table 2 below displays the original source domains for the
English metaphorical keywords listed in column 2. In column 3, we display
the information regarding whether an equivalent translation was provided. In-
formation regarding whether a majority of the participants selected the same
source domains is also provided in column 4. In column 5, the percentages of

participants who selected the similar most frequent terms are given. The higher
the percentages in column 5, the more centralized the translations are. A low
percentage, e.g., 6.78% for the most frequently used Mandarin term for ane-
mic, indicates many different Mandarin forms were found and therefore a low
consensus was reached.
Table 2. Features of Most Frequently Translated Terms.
Source Metaphorical Equivalent Similar Source Percentage of

Domains Keywords Translation? Domain? Participants
Selected This
Translation
building (a) collapse Yes Yes 17.91%
building (b) re-structured Yes Yes 71.19%
building (c) rebuilding Yes Yes 94.12%
person (d) ailing No Yes 13.33%
engine (e) sputtering No No [person] 18.52%
person (f) anemic No No 6.78%
[generic term –
‘instable’]
person (g) healthy Yes Yes 31.15%
person (h) recovery Yes Yes 31.25%
engine (i) heat up Yes Yes 13.11%
engine (j) operating Yes Yes 41.94%
From Table 2, we can see that a similar translation (column 3) was selected for
all except ailing, sputtering and anemic (shaded). Among these three, ailing
was translated using a different term in the similar source domain of person.
Sputtering was translated by 18.52% using the person source domain instead
of engine, whereas anemic was translated using a general term meaning ‘insta-
ble.’8 From the last column, five keywords (re-structured, rebuilding, healthy,
recovery, and operating; in bold) out of the ten were translated using the same
Mandarin terms by more than one-third of the 69 participants. Among these,
re-structured possesses over 71% of consensus while rebuilding has the highest
consensus, with more than 94% of the participants using this term.
8. Although some percentages are low in Table 2, these percentages constitute the dom-
inating percentages for a particular keyword.
142 Siaw-Fong Chung
The findings so far have informed us whether or not an equivalent term from
a similar or different source domain was selected by the translators. We also
discovered the degree of consensus among the participants by investigating the
percentages of the most frequently used translation. These results, however, are
still incomplete if we intend to explain the mechanisms of translation used by the
participants. We propose to investigate the collocation of the translated terms.
By doing so, we are able to explain the linguistic behaviors of the keywords
selected by the participants. It is believed that the strength of collocation with
the concept of ‘economy’ has also affected participants’ decision, an aspect not
examined previously by most translation studies.
Since all translations were given based on the relatedness of the metaphorical
keywords with economy, inTable 3 below, we present the collocation information
of the translated terms with ‘economy’ in Mandarin. We used a native-speaker
corpus (Chinese Gigaword corpus 2.0 with 455,526,209 words) to extract the
collocation information. The overall frequency of the most frequently translated
terms (column 2) in the Chinese Gigaword corpus is given in column 3. The
word ‘economy’ in Mandarin has a total of 614,174 instances in the corpus.
The T-scores of each translated term with ‘economy,’ as well as their collocated
frequencies, are given in column 4.9 In order to understand further whether
these selected translations are by certainty collocated well with ‘economy,’ in
the final three columns, we provide the top five collocates for the translated
terms in column 2. All translations are provided by the author. Translated terms
in Mandarin are represented by the use of inverted commas, e.g., ‘collapse’ to
mean the Mandarin translation for the keyword collapse.
By looking at the T-scores in column 4, we might be surprised as some equiv-
alent translations, e.g., ‘collapse’, display lower T-score than a non-equivalent
translation, e.g., ‘dysfunctional’/‘dysfunction’ for ailing and sputtering. At first
glance, it might seem that the proposed translations, albeit agreed upon by most
of the participants, are not collocated strongly with ‘economy’ in the corpus.
The reason for the low T-score value is in fact a relative issue. If we look at
their collocates in the fifth column, only some translations, ‘collapse’, ‘dys-
function(al)’,‘instable’, ‘healthy’, and ‘recovery’ have ‘economy’ among their
top collocates (see shaded collocates in column 5). This means that these trans-
lated terms are used more often with ‘economy’ than ‘rebuilding’, ‘heat up’,
and ‘operating’ are, whereby ‘economy’ is not among their top collocates. We
9. The T-score calculation was selected, as we were more concerned with “certainty of
collocation” (cf. Hunston 2002:73). The usually reported Mutual-Information (MI)
value unfortunately provides a high score for low-frequency items, which is not what
this paper wanted to present here.
Table 3. The Mandarin Collocates of the Most Frequently Used Mandarin Translations.
Metaphorical Most Overall Freq. T-score Collocates of Translated Terms
Keywords Frequently in Corpus (Freq. with
Translated ‘economy’)
Mandarin
Terms Collocates Freq. T-scores
stock 539 23.195
economy 158 12.411
(a) collapse ‘collapse’ 1,477 12.411 (158) market 97 9.723
Wall Street 72 8.482
crisis 64 7.974
job 7158 83.967
(b) re-structured committee 5009 69.941
disaster site 4246 65.105
‘rebuilding’ 58,683 34.271 (1,328) help 3860 61.772
(c) rebuilding
quake-disaster 3414 58.395
economy 8472 91.695

(d) ailing export 2137 46.129
‘dysfunctional’ America 1619 39.037
or ‘dysfunction’ 23,790 91.695 (8,472) prosperity 1064 32.536
(e) sputtering degree 979 31.248
weather 1067 32.612

cause 903 30.008
Mandarin translation of English economic metaphors
(f) anemic ‘instable’ 8,251 23.937 (595) influence 585 23.952

economy 595 23.937
politics 580 23.885
143
144
Metaphorical Most Overall Freq. T-score Collocates of Translated Terms

Keywords Frequently in Corpus (Freq. with
Translated ‘economy’)
Mandarin
Terms Collocates Freq. T-scores
system 2863 53.411
Siaw-Fong Chung
development 2673 51.312

(g) halethy ‘healthy’ 20,133 37.178 (1,436) finance 1708 41.128
market 1462 37.795
economy 1436 37.178
economy 14934 121.889
prosperity 7955 89.154
(h) recovery ‘recovery’ 28,653 121.889 America 2788 51.700
(14,934) globe 1517 38.747
Japan 1526 38.432
election 223 14.927
situation
election battle 164 12.798
(i) heat up ‘heat up’ 1,912 7.346
election 110 10.369
(59)
relationship 80 8.776
activity 63 7.737
government 2259 45.446
party 1879 43.122
politics 1540 38.506
(j) operating ‘operating’ 49,968 25.998
market 1564 38.488
(805)
party’s 1409 37.469
administration
can judge the rank of ‘economy’ by inferring from the T-score in column 4 when
placed below the list in descending order in the last column of Table 3. For
instance, we can infer that ‘heat up’ in (i) seems to appear soon after the top five
collocates but ‘rebuilding’ for (b) and (c) might appear further down the list.
When ‘economy’ is not among the top collocates, this shows that the Man-
darin translation may be used more frequently with words from domains other
than ‘economy’ (e.g., ‘disaster’ for ‘rebuilding’, ‘election’ for ‘heat up’, and
‘government’ for ‘operating’). As a result, the T-scores for these words are dif-
ferent from the patterns of the most frequently used translated keywords. This
finding would not be available if we looked into the translation in the previous
sections per se. From here, we can summarize the similarities of concepts and the
principle of translation as follows: (a) Some concepts in Mandarin (‘rebuilding’,
‘heat up’, and ‘operating’) which are not specifically used for ‘economy’ will
also be selected by participants because most translations are governed by the
principle of ‘equivalent term first’; (b) Some other concepts in Mandarin (‘col-
lapse’, ‘healthy’, and ‘recovery’) are themselves strong collocates of ‘economy’
and will naturally be selected; and (c) Some concepts in Mandarin (‘dysfunction’
and ‘instable’) are themselves strong collocates of ‘economy’ and will also be
selected even if they are not an equivalent translation of the English keywords.
In the section below, we try to explain the discrepancies between Mandarin
and English by further consulting corpora data. By doing so, we hope to provide
a better explanation for the linguistic items we selected and to contrast the
corpora data with our experimental results.
6. Further Comparison against Corpus Analysis
For Mandarin data, the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Mandarin Chinese
was used while for the English data, the Wall Street Journal (1994) was selected.
The former is a tagged corpus with over 5 million words of Mandarin usage in
Taiwan (available at http://www.sinica.edu.tw/SinicaCorpus/). The Wall Street
Journal is one of the corpora in the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), available
at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc/online/index.html. The size of the Wall Street
Journal is 14.3 MB (about 5 million words).10
10. economy is a person, economy is a building, economy is a competition, econ-

omy is a war, and economy is an airplane in Mandarin, as well as economy is a
moving vehicle in English, have also been reported in Huang, Chung, and Ahrens
(2006). A full-scale comparison of the conceptual metaphors was not discussed pre-
viously.
146 Siaw-Fong Chung
For the search in both of these corpora, a target term was chosen. For the
Mandarin data, the target term used was ‘economy,’ while its English equivalent
term was searched for in the Wall Street Journal. The standard search in the
Mandarin data yielded a maximum of 2,000 instances and all these instances
were examined manually to determine the existence of metaphorical expres-
sions. The search in the corpus of the Wall Street Journal produced 100 pages of
instances and each page contained 100 instances. The first 500 instances were
chosen for the analysis. A metaphor was identified when there was a mapping
from the target domain of ‘economy’ to a concrete source domain. For instance,
‘economy’ is used metaphorically in the phrase ‘the economy takes off’ when
the motion of ‘taking off’ is concrete and the notion of ‘economy’ is abstract.
This concrete-to-abstract domain mapping was also applied to the English data.
This analysis adopted the prototypical view of language by Rosch and Mervis
(1975); that is, the more frequently occurring items are representative of the more
prototypical or conventional use of language. Based on this analysis, several
conceptual metaphors were found, as shown in Table 4 below, including the three
conceptual metaphors (in bold) that were discussed in the previous section.
Table 4. Distributions of Economy Metaphors in the English and Mandarin Corpora.

Economy Metaphors Mandarin English
‘economy’ economy
Types Tokens % Types Tokens %
1. ECONOMY IS A 11 121 39 25 131 61
PERSON
2. ECONOMY IS A 10 102 33 8 12 6
BUILDING
3. economy is a 10 40 13 2 4 2
competition
4. economy is a war 12 23 7 – – –
5. economy is a journey 9 15 5 – – –
6. economy is an 3 10 3 – – –
airplane
7. economy is a moving – – – 16 51 24
vehicle
8. ECONOMY IS AN – – – 8 17 8
ENGINE
Total 55 311 100 59 215 100
For the Mandarin data, 311 recurring metaphorical instances from 2,000 in-
stances (15.55%) were found. The English data yielded 215 metaphorical in-
stances from 500 instances (43%). These percentages were unexpectedly lower
for Mandarin ‘economy’ but higher for English ‘economy,’ as Chung (2009:77)
found that about one-third of the corpora instances were metaphorical (based
on her investigation of 100,000 corpora instances from both Taiwan and China).
The lower percentage of metaphorical instances in Mandarin could be due to its
‘balanced’ data from Academia Sinica while the higher percentage of metaphors
from the Wall Street Journal again proves the pervasiveness of metaphors in the
economic genre.11
From Table 4 above, the first three metaphors occur in both English and
Mandarin, and the source domains of person, building, and competition are
the most productive for Mandarin. The most frequently occurring metaphor is
economy is a person for both languages but with Mandarin being lower in
percentage (39%) than English is (61%). Other source domains found only in
Mandarin include war, journey, and airplane, whereas the source domains
found only in English are moving vehicle and engine. From Table 4, since
engine was not found in the Mandarin data in Academia Sinica, this may explain
why participants used the person domain for sputtering. The results from Table 4
also show that the two languages differ in their use of conceptual metaphors, with
English using twice as many person metaphors as Mandarin does. Mandarin,
in turn, uses more instances of building metaphors than English does. This,
again, explains the easiness of translating rebuilding and re-structured by the
majority participants.
7. Discussion and Conclusion
Using both experimental and corpora data, the goal of this work was to ex-
amine the conceptual relatedness of economic metaphors between languages.
We expected to see similarities and differences between language models when
expressing closely related ideas about the economy.
Unlike previous corpus-based studies which provide the linguistic similari-
ties and differences between languages, our study found that some concepts such
as building are commoner than the engine concept (both within English, as
building still dominates engine, and cross-linguistic wise, when engine is not
present in Mandarin corpora data). When Mandarin and English are concerned,
participants were comfortably translating the rebuilding of and the re-structured
economy using a similar concept of building. For the engine metaphors, a sim-
ilar concept is utilized for the translation of operation but not for sputtering, as
11. Since the conceptual metaphors within the corpora were measured in percentages of
distributions, comparisons can still be made across corpora (with additional aware-
ness of factors causing the differences).
148 Siaw-Fong Chung
sputtering was translated more often by referring to the ‘dysfunctional’ body

of a person. Chung, Huang and Ahrens (2003: 795) have once mentioned that
“aeroplane is used in Chinese, and vehicle in English,” referring to the in-
stances of ‘the economy takes off’ in Mandarin versus the economy slows down
in English. However, when our participants were asked to translate the sput-
tering economy, an airplane vocabulary, into Mandarin, they did not resort to
the airplane domain, which is itself a closer concept of engine than person is.
From corpora data (cf. Chung et al. (2003)), it seems possible to explain that the
Mandarin speakers use the airplane concept when they want to describe the
rising economy. A downturn economy was described using the degrading body
of a person.
Figure 3 below displays the similarities of concepts between the two lan-
guages. For each keyword, the longer the bar is, the more similar the two lan-
guages are.
rebuilding
BUILDING re-structured
collapse
ailing
anemic
PERSON healthy
recovery
sputtering
ENGINE heat up
operating
Figure 3. Similarity Scale of Mandarin and English in Keyword Translation.
From Figure 3, we can see that rebuilding, re-structured and operating dis-
play the highest similarity of concepts between Mandarin and English. Com-
paratively, healthy, recovery and sputtering are less similar than rebuilding,
re-structured and operating because a majority of the participants were unable

to produce a similar translation for both. The shorter bars come from collapse,
ailing, anemic and heat up. These keywords, albeit they possess an equivalent
translation in Mandarin, when they were used with economy, the direct trans-
lations were not selected by the participants. Instead, these expressions were
translated using other concepts such as the use of a general expression (insta-
ble to replace an unfamiliar description of the economy (because ‘an anemic
economy’ is less familiar to the Mandarin speakers). We also discovered that
the decision the participants made was related to the collocations of ‘economy’
with the Mandarin translations.
To conclude, our findings show that participants employed certain mecha-
nisms when selecting a translation for a term. These mechanisms are able to
explain beyond what Deignan et al. (1997) had postulated for language varia-
tions, i.e., whether or not the same conceptual metaphor has similar or different
linguistic expressions, etc. ((1) previous). We summarize our overall findings in
(6) below.
(6) a. When translating an economy-related metaphorical keyword, partici-

pants first consider whether a direct translation is available, and if this
translation also matches the collocation of ‘economy.’ If these two cri-
teria are met, this term will likely be selected.
b. However, if an equivalent term is available, but this term does not match
the collocation of ‘economy’ in the translated language, this term will
likely be replaced.
c. In a different case, if an equivalent translation is not available, a highly
collocated term with ‘economy’ which best fits the meaning of the orig-
inal sentence will be selected, regardless whether or not this term falls
within the same concept of the original sentence.
d. In some cases, even if an expression is an equivalent translation and the
term also matches the collocation of ‘economy’ but this term will not be
selected because it is overruled by a frequency-effect whereby a more
familiar use with economy is employed to replace the direct translation.
By understanding these mechanisms, we are able to explain how a bilingual

speaker might translate a concept from a source language to his or her mother
tongue. Previous studies on economic metaphors often emphasize the similar-
ities and differences cross-linguistically. Few have looked at the reasons why
different translations are used in expressing a foreign concept into one’s mother
tongue. Some may even find it hard to pinpoint why some metaphors are in-
terpreted as a similar or different form in another language. This chapter has
150 Siaw-Fong Chung
demonstrated an analysis of translation task that is able to outline the mechan-

isms that affect the decision made by participants. The results provide explana-
tion as to why certain metaphors cause more difficulty to ESP Mandarin-English
learners. A lexical analysis of economic metaphors as such also will help to raise
awareness in the teaching of economic metaphors.
Appendix [Translations are given in example (5) previously]
(5) a. The war in Iraq has caused the collapse of the U.S. economy.
i. (5.00)
ii. (1.67)
b. It is unsure whether the ailing economy will become as healthy as before.
i. (4.67)
ii. (1.67)
i. (5.00)
ii. (1.00)
i. (4.33)
ii. (1.00)
i. (5.00)
ii. (1.67)
i.
(4.67)
ii.
(1.67)
i.
(4.67)
ii. (1.67)
i. (5.00)
ii. Snow (3.33)
Acknowledgements
The research discussed herein was supported partly by the funding of the Na-
tional Science Council (NSC 97-2410-H-004-001- and 99-2410-H-004-206-).
Comments from the editors of this volume are highly appreciated.
References
Boers, Frank
1997 When a bodily source domain becomes prominent:The joy of counting
Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Cognitive
Linguistics Conference, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Gerard J. Steen
(eds.), 47–56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Boers, Frank
2000 Enhancing metaphoric awareness in specialized reading. English for
Specific Purposes 19: 137–147.
Booth, Richard A.
1994 Drowning in money, awash in metaphors. Wall Street Journal (Eastern
edition), A18, New York: September 28.
Browne, M.N. and J.K. Quinn
1999 Dominant economic metaphors and the postmodern subversion of the
subject. In The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection
of Literature and Economics, M. Woodmansee and M. Osteen (eds.),
131–149. New York: Routledge.
2000 Metaphor and vocabulary teaching in ESP economics. English for
Specific Purposes 19(2): 149–165.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Timothy Ennis
2001 A comparative study of metaphor in Spanish and English financial
reporting. English for Specific Purposes 20(3): 249–266.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Andreas Musolff
2003 ‘Battered hero’ or ‘innocent victim’? A comparative study of
metaphors for Euro trading in British and German financial report-
ing. English for Specific Purposes 22(2): 153–176.
Chung, Siaw-Fong
2008 Cross-linguistic comparisons of the market metaphors. Corpus Lin-
guistics and Linguistic Theory 4(2): 141–175.
152 Siaw-Fong Chung
Chung, Siaw-Fong
2009 A Corpus-driven Approach to Source Domain Determination. Lan-
guage and Linguistics Monograph Series. Nankang:Academia Sinica.
Chung, Siaw-Fong and Kathleen Ahrens
2004 Teaching economy metaphors:A psycholinguistic perspective through
the CMM. In the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Sym-
posium and Book Fair on English Teaching Volume 2, Taipei: ROC
English Teachers’ Association-Republic of China. [In CD Rom]
Chung, Siaw Fong, Chu-Ren Huang and Kathleen Ahrens
2003 Economy is a transportation device: Contrastive representation of
source domain knowledge in English and Chinese. In the Proceedings
of the Special Session for the International Conference on Natural
Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering (NLP-KE): Upper
Ontology and Natural Language Processing (UONLP). 790–796.
Diegnan, Alice, Danuta Gabryś and Agnieszka Solska
1997 Teaching English metaphors using cross-linguistic awareness-raising
activities. ELT Journal 51(4): 352–360.
Duyck, Wouter, Isabel Depestel, Wim Fias and Bert Reynvoet
2008 Cross-lingual numerical distance priming with second-language num-
ber words in native-to third-language number word translation. The
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(9): 1281–1290.
Ellis, Rod
1994 The Study of Second LanguageAcquisition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gong, Shu-Ping, Kathleen Ahrens and Chu-Ren Huang
2007 Chinese sketch engine and mapping principles: A corpus-based study
of conceptual metaphors using the building source domain. In the
Proceedings of the 8th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop 2007
(CLSW 2007). 130–136.The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong
Kong.
Grady, Joseph E.
1997 Theories are buildings revisited. Cognitive Linguistics 8(4): 267–
290.
Herrera, Honesto
2008 A metaphor corpus in business press headlines. Ibérica 15: 51–70.
1993 The economy is an organism – not a machine. Futures 25(4): 392–403.
Huang, Chu-Ren, Siaw-Fong Chung and Kathleen Ahrens
2006 An ontology-based exploration of knowledge systems for metaphor. In
Ontologies in the Context of Information Systems: An AIS SIG-ODIS
Initiative, Rajiv Kishore, Ram Ramesh and Raj Sharman (eds.), 489–
517. Springer.
Hunston, Susan
2002 Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George
1993 The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought, An-
drew Ortony (ed.), Second Edition, 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press.
Lu, Louis and Kathleen Ahrens
2008 Ideological influences on building metaphors in Taiwanese presiden-
tial speeches. Discourse and Society 19(3): 383–408.
O’Connor, Kathleen T.
1998 Money and finance as solid, liquid, and gas in Spanish. Metaphor and
Symbol 13(2): 141–157.
Olohan, Maeve
2004 Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. New York: Routledge.
Rosch, Eleanor and Caroline B. Mervis
1975 Family resemblance: Studies in the internal structure of categories.
Cognitive Psychology 7: 573–605. San Diego: Academic Press.
Semino, Elena
2002 A sturdy baby or a derailing train? Metaphorical representations of
the euro in British and Italian newspapers. Text 22(1): 107–139.
Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jörg Schmid
2006 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. Harlow, England, London &
New York: Pearson Longman.
White, Michael
2003 Metaphor and economics: The case of growth. English for Specific
Purposes 22: 131–151.
2009 How business press headlines get their message across: A different
perspective on metaphor. In Metaphor and Discourse, Andreas Mu-
solff and Jörg Zinken (eds.), 135–152. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Translating metaphor in business/economics
dictionary articles: What the theory says and what
lexicographers should do
Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Marisol Velasco-Sacristán
Abstract
Metaphors have been extensively investigated since the publication of Metaphors We

Live by. For example, the role metaphors play in framing political and economic dis-
course, the translatability of metaphors, and the different translation procedures have
been the object of analysis of many researchers. This chapter adds to the current state
of play by explaining some of the decisions made when translating the English Account-
ing Dictionary into Spanish (Fuertes-Olivera et al. 2010) and offers an explanation of
the influence of English as lingua franca in the introduction of metaphorical terms into
Spanish. For example, the term sunk cost should be rendered verbatim [Spanish: coste
hundido] instead of paraphrastically ‘costes en los que se ha incurrido en un proyecto, que
no pueden cambiarse por acciones actuales o futuras’, (Garcı́a Villalón and Martı́nez
Barbeitio 2008) for two reasons. Firstly, as language planners, translators are always
introducing novel metaphors in a target language (Fuertes-Olivera and Pizarro-Sánchez
2002). Secondly, the verbatim rendering facilitates the understanding of the metaphorical
scenario in itself. Verbatim renderings of terminological metaphors assume that experts
have previously come across the term, i.e., sunk cost in English and have understood it
within the conceptual scenario where the term was created. The decisions taken can be
explained within the agent models, i.e., approaches that analyze the people who produce
the translated texts and engage in the translation processes (Dam and Zethsen 2009), pro-
posed by scholars such as Chesterman (2009), who claim that Translator Studies consist
of three branches: cultural, cognitive and sociological, and Fuertes-Olivera (2011), who
has assumed a literal effect hypothesis in the translation of terms.
1. Introduction
The spread of English internationally is based on ecocultural grounds, a term

used by Brutt-Griffler (2002) that associates the expansion of English with the
development of a world market and global development in fields such as science,
technology, entertainment, economics, and media. Rogerson-Revell (2007), for
156 Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Marisol Velasco-Sacristán
example, uses the term English for International Business (EIB) for referring
to the English language used in business encounters by speakers with different
mother languages. She adds that there have been attempts to describe the role
of language and culture in international business communication, as well as
an interest within the field of business language training for describing which
language features do really present difficulties in communicating in interna-
tional encounters, and for discussing strategies which could be used with the
aim of overcoming difficulties that range from comprehension problems, es-
pecially fast processing speed, through difficulties in both comprehension and
production, due to vocabulary limitations, to difficulties in managing interac-
tions appropriately.
The role of English in international business contexts has been investigated
on specific text genres used by the international business community, particularly
negotiations (Vuorela 2005), meetings (Rogerson-Revell 2008), e-mails (Evans
2010), and advertising (Fuertes-Olivera et al. 2001). This paper follows suit
and advances our understanding of its role by focusing on a genre that has not
been investigated very much so far: dictionary articles, i.e., the texts used by
lexicographers for describing the lexicon of a language in a standardized way.
In particular, the paper will deal with the translation of English metaphorical
accounting terms into Spanish.
Van der Meer (1999, 2010), and Siqueira et al. (2009) have paid some at-
tention to the role metaphor plays in dictionary articles. Their works, however,
were not concerned with translation issues, but with something else. Van der
Meer (1999) criticizes the tendency of the main English learners’ dictionaries to
give sense definitions of highly frequent figurative uses of a word before the less
frequently occurring literal meaning, and presents his view in relation with the
treatment accorded to metaphorical terms in dictionaries of business/economics
English (Van der Meer 2010).
He supports his view by indicating that the practice of presenting sense def-
initions of metaphorical terms before their literal meanings does not alert the
learner sufficiently to the fact that the use of a certain word is in fact figurative,
and that in the case of numerous words the non-figurative sense is still there as a
syntactic fact, enriching the figurative use with a ‘by-way-of-speaking’ dimen-
sion. He adds that the reasons for the present widespread practice are twofold.
First, there is a strong tendency to give prominence to the most frequently occur-
ring sense. Second, learners use their dictionaries primarily to access individual
meanings. These two concerns have pushed three crucial learning issues into
the background. The first is that “vocabulary development is as important a
function of the learner’s dictionary as meaning retrieval.” (Van der Meer 1999:
196) And awareness of meaning extension is a vital aspect of vocabulary learn-
Translating metaphor in business/economics 157
ing. The second issue is that the figurative uses of a specific word cannot be
fully understood except by reference to its literal meaning. Treating this basic
meaning first would enhance the non-native learner’s awareness of synchronic
etymology, which is the realisation that meanings may be related to other, more
basic meanings: “Learning a new language involves having to memorise many
facts that are unrelated, and memorising unrelated facts is much harder than
facts evincing a certain pattern, or facts that can be shown to be related”. (Van
der Meer, 2010: 131-132).
The third issue is concerned with his recommendation of writing sense def-
initions using a vocabulary, e.g., collocations, that at least strongly hints at the
field of discourse from which the metaphor was originally taken.
Siqueira el al. (2009: 173) analyzed a terminological dictionary on envi-
ronmental law in order to find metaphorically used lexical items. They used
the criteria developed by the Pragglejaz group (2007) as well as two further
criteria – conceptual metaphor productivity and metaphor resistance to literal
paraphrases – and found that there is a continuum of meaning between metaphor-
ical and literal, that conceptual metaphors are abundant, and that “metaphorical
extensions seem to be one of the main reasons for the polysemy of lexical
items.”
This chapter offers a somewhat different perspective. On the one hand, it
analyzes metaphorical terms taken from a dictionary, El Diccionario de Con-
tabilidad Inglés-Español (Fuertes-Olivera et al. 2010). On the other hand, it
explains some of the decisions taken during the process of translating English
metaphorical accounting terms into Spanish. Our approach is rather different,
as we will restrict our comments to headwords, i.e., the translation equivalents
of different dictionary articles. This means that we are not going to take into
considerations contexts and other elements present in a dictionary article, e.g.,
definitions, sentence examples, phrases, etc. . . In our view, this paper, which
is well-connected with some of the topics discussed in this volume, offers a
broader view by defending the idea that the translation of metaphorical terms
is not only influenced by the tenets of Cognitive Linguistics but also by the
aesthetic function of the metaphor and the role of English as lingua franca in
business/economics. For example, the introduction of novel metaphorical terms
into Spanish can be considered an adequate lexicographical strategy in order
to maintain the main characteristics of terminology, which deals with concepts
and not with word meanings.
Section 2 reviews the role metaphor plays in specialized languages, particu-
larly in business/economics discourse. Section 3 offers a brief description of the
Accounting Dictionaries that contain the data we have analyzed in this chaper.
Section 4 discusses the decisions made during the process of translating En-
glish metaphorical terms into Spanish. Our decisions connect this paper with
the current state of play in Translation Studies that are aiming at promoting the
agent models that could explain some of the decisions taken by translators by
combining cultural, cognitive and sociological perspectives (Chesterman 2009).
The paper concludes by summarizing our main findings.
2. Metaphor in business/economics discourse
Since Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) seminal work, the conceptual theory of
metaphor has defended the idea that metaphor structures thinking, and knowl-
edge, that it is central to abstract language, that it is grounded in physical ex-
perience, and that metaphor is no longer a matter of language but a matter of
thought and action that can be very useful for understanding abstract concepts,
framing political and economic discourse, and directing people’s actions.
Since its inception, the conceptual theory of metaphor has offered hundreds
of examples of its function at the level of thought for developing knowledge
about the world, understanding abstract concepts and profiling the underlying
contextual and ideological motivations that give rise to its linguistic features
(Rojo López and Orts Llopis 2010). In the domain of business/economics,
for example, we can cite research that uses a commonly-accepted methodol-
ogy with which researchers describe the role metaphors play in framing busi-
ness/economics discourse: researchers collect examples of metaphorical ex-
pressions, study them in terms of the underlying conceptual metaphors and
draw conclusions that are shaped within the specific aim of each particular
research.
Dodd (2002) analyzed the metaphors used by American entrepreneurs to
give meaning to their life-and-business stories and found that entrepreneurs
give meaning to the entrepreneurial process by using vehicles such as jour-
ney, race, parenting, building, war, lunacy/iconoclasm, and passion. She con-
cluded that entrepreneurship “vehicles emphasise process (verbs) rather than
objects (nouns), and are often highly emotionally charged (parenting, passion,
lunacy/iconoclasm)” (Dodd, 2002: 525).
White (2003: 148) showed how “quantitative events in the world of eco-
nomics are typically understood and explained in metaphoric terms.” He ana-
lyzed the growth metaphor and concluded that this metaphor is highly active
and productive and therefore demanded its understanding as a teaching tool that
could be used in order to favour vocabulary acquisition by language learners
who would benefit from the relational vocabulary structures that his analysis of
the growth metaphor unveiled.
Charteris-Black (2004) combined the conceptual theory of metaphor with the

tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis in order to increase our awareness of the so-
cial relations that are forged, maintained and reinforced by using metaphors. He
found that the financial reporting of business affairs is explained by using three
generic conceptual keys i.e., the economy is human; economic problems
are natural disasters; market changes are physical movements, which
allows him to claim that notions of conflict are widespread in business/economic
English discourse, and that economic theories exert an influence on the specific
metaphors used in these texts. For example, he claims that neo-classical eco-
nomic theory involves the concealment of agency and the language chosen in
financial reporting assists in sustaining free-market ideology.
Bielenia-Grajewska (2009) showed that the language of investment banking
in several languages (i.e., English, German, Polish, and Spanish) is constrained
by pragmatic factors, thus favouring the existence of differences and similarities
that can be explained by resorting to linguistic, social, historical, political, and
economic factors.
Finally, Skorczynska (2010: 40) evaluated the selection of metaphors in a
published business English textbook using findings from a specialised corpus
of written business English. She found that the selection made by the book’s
author is not supported by the corpus data, which makes her conclude that “we
need a thorough examination of business discourse samples in order to compile
optimum teaching materials, which focus on both linguistic and conceptual
metaphors”.
We can add to the above research by paying attention to the creation of
metaphorical terms in languages other than English, the current lingua franca
that permeates business/economics discourse in every known language of the
world. We believe that the process of creating metaphorical terms is also in-
fluenced by their aesthetic value in specialized discourse. Sager (1997: 29),
for example, claims that the aesthetic role of metaphor “produces metaphor-
ical combined names whose motivation can be found in similarities of form,
function, and position”. This means that the analysis of metaphor (or figurative
language) in specialized discourse in general, and in business/economics texts
in particular, must also make room for the fact that experts (i.e., those who
introduce terms in a language) may have created metaphorical terms for no bet-
ter reason that enhancing the rhetorical potential of the text they are creating,
an idea already introduced in the academic discussion by Meyer, Zaluski, and
Mackintosh (1997).
Meyer, Zaluski, and Mackintosh (1997) offer a classic description of the cog-
nitive and aesthetic functions in their analysis of Internet metaphorical terms.
On the one hand, they cite key conceptual themes underlying metaphorical In-
ternet terms: (a) transportation, (b) mail and postal service, (c) architecture, (d)
the printed medium, (e) the community, (f) conversation, (g) commerce, (h) the
underworld, (i) fire and explosives, (j) animals. They also claim that the cognitive
function has allowed some metaphorical terms to spawn numerous conceptually
related terms, some other metaphorical terms to show conceptually inconsistent
terms, creating instances of the phenomenon known as mixed metaphor, while
still further metaphors gave rise to misleading and confusing metaphors which
cast doubts on the generally accepted idea of metaphor as a cognitive tool.
For example, spiders crawling the web/jumping between lines is a misleading
metaphor and causes a great deal of difficulty for advanced computer-science
students who might have trouble understanding how spiders work. On the other
hand, Meyer, Zaluski, and Mackintosh (1997:12) also claim that examples of
misleading conceptual metaphors, as well as many other Internet metaphors are
so fascinating (i.e., they have aesthetic value) that “authors writing on Internet
related subjects (e.g., in computer science) often include some explicit com-
mentary on the terminology”. They cite examples of Internet metaphors, which
are the object of puns and other word-plays. For example, the term Gofer which
might be based on the burrowing animal metaphor or be a pun based on go for.
Following suit, the rest of our paper is devoted to presenting a case study
related with the translation of metaphorical terms in dictionary articles, i.e.,
the translation of the English Accounting Dictionary (Nielsen, Mourier, and
Bergenholtz 2010) into Spanish.
3. A case study: The English Accounting Dictionary
As a research methodology, case study research has been extremely influential

in shaping the way we do research in the Social Sciences (Casanave 2010). For
example, in the field of education, Wolcott’s study on general education (1973),
Halliday’s study of Nigel’s first language acquisition (1975), and Schmidt’s study
in second language learning (1983) can be cited as they “have shaped discussion
and research in their respective fields of focus in forceful and productive ways.”
(Van Lier 2005: 195)
Case study research is a contextual form of research that has three main char-
acteristics (Casanave 2010). Firstly, its object of inquiry is unique and delimited,
i.e., bounded. This means that the researcher’s interest is in the particular rather
than the general. Secondly, by choosing a case study tradition, researchers are
committed to presenting in-depth analysis of particular phenomena, be they par-
ticular people, sites, groups, institutions, dictionary articles, teaching materials,
etc. Thirdly, case studies are always situated or embedded in a particular context
(Yin 2003). In this research, our context is the extra-lexicographical social sit-
uation associated with translating English metaphorical accounting terms into
Spanish.
Grosse (1988: 131) comments that case studies are currently used in Busi-
ness Schools around the world in order to analyze actual or simulated problems.
As a method for teaching business English, case studies teach language through
content, rather than through grammatical or lexical exercises. They are very
popular in ESP circles considering that the types of learning activities asso-
ciated with the case study method – typically, small group discussions, role
plays, simulations, and problem solving – force learners to practice all language
skills and some professional ones (see Almagro Esteban and Pérez Casado
2004; Brett 2000; Flowerdew 2010; Rogerson-Revell 2007; Vuorela 2005). For
example, Flowerdew (2010) has used the case study approach in order to de-
scribe key teaching points in connection with devising and implementing a
business module proposal for final-year students at a tertiary institution in Hong
Kong.
The case study methodology is also used in the field of lexicography, al-
though adapted to the characteristics of the object of study, i.e., dictionaries
and dictionary usage. Fuertes-Olivera and Arribas-Baño (2008) have analysed
eight business dictionaries with a view to presenting their usefulness for teach-
ing business English in Spain. Tan (2009: 93) has also carried out a case study
“on the legal expression ‘assault occasioning actual bodily harm”’ (hereinafter
‘aoabh’) to find out how it should be translated.” Similarly, Walker (2009) has
analyzed three types of dictionaries in order to assess the way in which 18 collo-
cations, commonly found in business English texts, are treated. For example, he
found that there is a lack of agreement regarding the lexicographical treatment
accorded to the same collocations in dictionaries that aim at satisfying the needs
of the same user: intermediate learners of business English.
Our study is an example of a case study as it makes a deep inquiry into the
English Accounting Dictionary with the aim of observing and explaining the
decisions taken in relation with the translation of English metaphorical terms
into Spanish.
The English Accounting Dictionary (Nielsen, Mourier, and Bergenholtz
2010) is one of the Accounting Dictionaries, i.e., they are a set of two monolin-
gual and three bilingual dictionaries with the languages Danish, English and
Spanish (a Spanish dictionary and a Spanish-English dictionary are in the
pipeline). The theoretical foundation underlying the project gives priority to
lexicographical functions, i.e. the help these dictionaries can give to users in
specific types of situation where users require knowledge to resolve issues re-
lating to accounting (Bergenholtz and Tarp 2003, 2004; Fuertes-Olivera, 2009;
Nielsen and Mourier 2007; Tarp 2008). The dictionaries are designed to meet
certain types of user needs through the careful selection of data and specific
options for accessing the data so that the answers to users’ questions match their
needs in a number of different contexts.
The data in the Accounting Dictionaries are selected from periodically up-
dated text corpora containing accounting and financial reporting texts in the
three languages. These texts represent several genres that are relevant for find-
ing data that can fulfil user needs and include national statutes, EU legislation,
national and international accounting standards, interpretive rulings, textbooks,
publications from accounting firms as well as annual reports. The data are not
selected on the basis of frequency of occurrence, but because they are relevant
for the functions of the dictionaries (Fuertes-Olivera and Nielsen 2011). For ex-
ample Danish and Spanish collocations are primarily selected because they are
difficult to translate into English. In addition, accounting experts are consulted
to ensure the most comprehensive coverage of terms. This has resulted in regu-
larly updated dictionaries that attempt to keep abreast of the latest developments
in accounting and its terminology.
4. Translating English metaphorical accounting terms into Spanish
Samaniego Fernández (2011) claims that the translation of metaphor has been
either neglected or a major source of conflict, especially because it has always
been treated with a prescriptive focus, and mostly from a traditional, not a cog-
nitive point of view. Her main thesis is that many translation scholars stand on
uneasy terrain regarding the translatability of metaphor and metaphor transla-
tion procedures. She adds that the existence of different variables that might
have a bearing on the degree of translatability of metaphor have contributed
to that situation: cultural references, communicative purpose, functional rele-
vance, information burden, metaphor typology, co-text and context restrictions,
degree of compatibility of the conceptual and formal structures of the languages
involved, prevalent synchronic norms, foregrounding, degree of lexicalization
of the metaphor, translator’s competence, connotations, degree of anisomor-
phism between the source and target domain in both cultures, comprehensibil-
ity of the metaphor, cognitive role, the reference material used by translators,
the time pressure, the amendments introduced in post-translation revisions, the
translator’s mood or affections, client-imposed terms, etc. In a word, Samaniego
Fernández’s review on the translatability of metaphor and translation procedures
indicates that translators must adapt their translation activity to both internal and
external constraints, some of which may be beyond their reach.
Regarding the cognitive linguistics perspective, the translation of metaphor

is explained as a means of understanding one domain of experience, target,
in terms of another, source, by means of a mapping from the source onto the
target domain, “whereby the structural components of the schema are trans-
ferred to the target domain, ontological correspondences, thus also allowing
for knowledge-based inferences and entailments epistemic correspondences
(Schäffner 2004: 1258). Hence, the translation of metaphor is not a question of
individual metaphorical expressions but it becomes linked to the level of con-
ceptual systems in source and target culture. What is important for translation is
the presence of the conceptual metaphor, no matter whether the metaphoric
expressions are also present or not, and, if present, whether they are given
the same verbatim expression or not. In other words, the first consideration
regarding metaphors in translation is to preserve the metaphor at the macro-
level, even if specific metaphorical expressions were changed or not accounted
for in each individual case. This idea has three main developments. Firstly,
metaphor is no longer a translation phenomenon of one particular text, but be-
comes an intertextual phenomenon (Schäffner 2004). Secondly, the different
actors who take part in the communicative process may interpret metaphors
differently, perhaps because metaphors are partly culturally determined and
partly tied to previous personal experiences. In sum, culture and personal expe-
riences permeate translation (Samaniego Fernández 2011). Thirdly, the aes-
thetic role of metaphor plays no significant role and can therefore be dis-
carded.
In our view, the above principles do not fully apply to all text types and
genres, i.e., we believe that they have to be adapted and reinterpreted according
to the specific characteristics of the genre. For example, translation equivalents
in specialized dictionary articles are specific language expressions whose trans-
lations must render both the original concept and, whenever possible, a similar
metaphorical expression. This view is explained as follows.
Firstly, genre conventions demand the production of well-written texts, which
for writers of specialized texts usually mean texts full of rhetorical expressions,
perhaps as a consequence of their school years when their prescriptively-oriented
teachers instructed them to write in a fashion that valued the use of a formal
register, and the maintenance of figure of speech as mechanisms used for em-
bellishing texts. Consequently, experts in the field approach the translation of
source metaphorical terms by priming the maintenance of the original concep-
tual scenario, as well as using vivid and embellished language, something that
often leads to producing word-by-word translations, some of which enter the tar-
get language as novel metaphors (Fuertes-Olivera and Pizarro-Sánchez 2002;
Fuertes-Olivera, 2011). This translation procedure is reinforced by current ap-
proaches to descriptive terminology that, say, use ‘Google searchers’ in order to

document the decisions taken. Teubert (2005: 103) claims that
Beside traditional corpora, the Internet as virtual corpus becomes more and more
important; from it, domain-specific special corpora can be derived and continu-
ously updated (in the sense of a monitor corpus) using thesaurus-based filtering
techniques. By comparing newer texts with older ones, neologisms can be identi-
fied, that is, words (in our case terms) that have not been found or have only been
found in different contexts so far.
In our translation of the English metaphorical accounting text, we observed
that the above reflection proved correct and followed it in accordance with the
nature of terminology: terms are different from words, which means that with
terminology we are not confronted with meanings but with concepts, which, in
principle, are defined independently of any particular language. Fuertes-Olivera
and Pizarro-Sánchez (2002), among others, have explained this idea in their
analysis of the economic concept inflation with data taken from a translation
corpus. We followed the same translation strategy and rendered word-by-word
translations of the English metaphorical accounting terms whenever possible.
For example sunk cost was translated as ‘coste hundido’, a decision that was
supported by finding 87 examples of coste hundido in Spanish Internet home-
pages devoted to accounting issues. Our decision runs contrary to the translation
strategy adopted by Garcia Villalón and Martı́nez Barbeito (2008), who para-
phrase the English metaphorical term costes en los que se ha incurrido en
un proyecto, que no pueden cambiarse por acciones actuales o futuras ‘costs
which have been incurred at an earlier stage and therefore they are unavoid-
able and cannot be changed, which makes them irrelevant to decision-making’.
We found erroneous Garcı́a Villalón and Martı́nez Barbeito’s decision for three
main reasons: (i) it does not help translators who always demand a transla-
tion equivalent and not a paraphrase; (ii) it does not maintain the conceptual
scenario of the English term, and thus does not favor the acquisition of the
concept; (iii) it reduces the aesthetic value of a potential Spanish accounting
text.
Secondly, the nature of bilingual terminology signals the hegemony of En-
glish in today’s globalized world, and indicates that successful verbal commu-
nication in specialized discourse depends on unambiguous texts:
For the new technologies exhibiting rapid changes, this means that we have to
develop new forms of terminology work. Today, one can no longer wait until
some responsible semi-annually convening committee works on proposals, then
discusses objectives, reworks drafts and eventually passes a standardised termi-
nology. (Teubert 2005: 1000)
The hegemony of English is especially visible in the translations of the IAS/IFRS

terms, terms that are coined by the International Accounting Standard Board.
English is the lingua franca in financial reporting and it is therefore appropriate
to use English terminology as a point of departure. In accounting, however,
English is not just English. Despite harmonization and standardization efforts,
there is no clear and universally accepted language policy for English accounting
terminology, and even the international standards (IASs and IFRSs) reflect the
English used by their draftsmen, e.g. British English and American English.
The English metaphorical accounting term goodwill: (the established reputa-
tion of a business regarded as a quantifiable asset), which has two Spanish trans-
lation equivalents, i.e., ‘fondo de comercio’, traditional Spanish metaphorical
term, and ‘plusvalı́a’, a translation introduced into Spanish by the translators of
the original English IAS/IFRS texts, illustrates our view that, whenever possible,
we have to take decisions that eliminate ambiguity from the terminological work.
In the case of goodwill, Spanish plusvalı́a is not adequate for several reasons. In
addition to diffusing the conceptual scenario of the English metaphorical term,
Spanish plusvalı́a is a very general term i.e., it is a superordinate, and therefore
not very precise, i.e., it is conceptually ambiguous. In sum, our decision was to
translate goodwill as ‘fondo de comercio’, offer plusvalı́a as a synonym used in
the IAS/IFRS rules, and discard the use of paraphrases as we believe that bilin-
gual terminology must always offer a translation equivalent. In other words, we
defend the idea that the translation of metaphorical terms must always be based
on the existence of equivalence (the nil solution envisaged by some translation
scholars is not possible) and therefore we consider inadequate the paraphrase
valor de la clientela en un establecimiento que se fija en caso de traspaso ‘
the value of the clientele that is added when a business is sold’ used by Garcia
Villalón and Martı́nez Barbeito (2008) as a translation equivalent of goodwill.
Thirdly, although it is well-known that anisomorphism is widespread, i.e.,
Nielsen (2000: 152), for example, has shown that, almost, all bilingual dictionar-
ies contain headwords that are “so culture-specific so as to have no equivalents
in the target language”, we have devised translation strategies that always pro-
duced Spanish metaphorical accounting terms as translation equivalents of the
dictionary article. When we could not find a Spanish equivalent, we maintained
the English term and offered explanations of our decisions in different types of
usage notes. A case in point is the English acronym PIGS, i.e., Portugal, Italy,
Greece, and Spain, which has a purely literal meaning in English. In Spain,
however, this term is being used by some politicians and journalists with the
aim of criticizing some current economic policies. Thus a neutral, but indirectly
the sequence chosen makes the coincidence intentional, English term has been
changed into a Spanish loaded metaphorical term by profiling it within a partic-
ular political and economic context. Our decision was to maintain the English
term as Spanish translation equivalent and offer the following explanation:
Nota de uso [Eng: Usage note]
Es frecuente encontrarnos con referencias a este término en las que se traduce
el acrónimo PIGS por cerdos, el término español para pigs. Normalmente estas
referencias indican una intencionalidad polı́tica asociando la palabra cerdos a
una serie de decisiones de polı́tica económica que favorecen el incremento del
déficit de una economı́a.
[Spanish conservative newspapers tend to use PIGS and associated it with pigs in
order to emphasize the large deficits of the Spanish economy. They tend to indicate
that this view is also promoted by different English and American newspapers].
Our decisions can be explained within the tenets of Decision Theory and Trans-
lator Studies, two proposals that aim at uncovering the role of the translator in
translation, and are therefore adequate approaches for enlarging the influence
of cultural filters in contrastive studies, such as those typically associated with
Translation Studies.
Decision Theory deals with “decision-making”, defined as “(. . . ) part of
the process which the translator goes through in the course of formulating a
tt” (Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997: 37). Fuertes-Olivera and Velasco-Sacristán
(2001: 75–77) indicate that the earliest decision-making research concentrated
on the development of formal decision-making models that proved to be of
little use in their application to the translator’s performance. Hence, more recent
studies aimed at connecting objective choices and subjective ones. This connects
earlier Decision Theory with Translator Studies that consist of three branches:
cultural, cognitive, and sociological:
The cultural branch deals with values, ethics, ideologies, traditions, history, ex-
amining the roles and influences of translators and interpreters through history,
as agents of cultural evolution. The cognitive branch deals with mental processes,
decision-making, the impact of emotions, attitudes to norms, personality, etc. The
sociological branch deals with translators’/interpreters’ observable behaviour as
individuals or groups or institutions, their social networks, status and working
processes, their relations with other groups and with relevant technology, and so
on. (Chesterman 2009: 19)
Following Chesterman’s view, the decisions we have commented on and ex-

plained in previous paragraphs can be summarized by analyzing the transla-
tions of the 375 dictionary articles that contain the Spanish coste ‘cost’ as part
of translation equivalent. This means that our decisions are explained from the
target and not from the source, which connects our chapter with current propos-
als in the field of Cognitive Linguistics and Translation (Samaniego Fernández
2011). We are not offering quantitative data, but explaining our decisions in
terms of the following translation practices:
– On some occasions, the translation equivalents and the English metaphorical
terms agree on the same conceptual scenario, although they profile differently.
This can be explained on the grounds of cultural filters: the English metaphor-
ical term health care cost was translated by the Spanish metaphorical term
coste de prevención y enfermedad because Spanish emphasizes the outcome
enfermedad ‘illness’ instead of the condition salud ‘health’. In other words,
both terms maintain the conceptual scenario, but they are presented from dif-
ferent perspectives. Similarly, the English metaphorical term running cost was
translated by the Spanish metaphorical term ‘coste corriente’, a dead Spanish
metaphor that assumes the existence of costes no corrientes, i.e., ‘costs that
cannot be accounted a priori’, for example, costs associated with the practice
of bribery. Similar examples are English job-cost sheet ‘listado de fichas de
coste por obra y servicio’, which profiles the existence of different types of
‘jobs’, and locked-in cost ‘coste inevitable’, which rests on a Spanish tradition
of considering that something is beyond our reach.
– On some occasions, the translation equivalents and the source metaphorical
terms are literal translations that are based on the pervasiveness of universal
metaphors in business/economics discourse. Both the English and the Span-
ish terms are examples of dead metaphors: coste de fusión as translation of
‘merger cost’; coste de lanzamiento as translation of ‘start-up cost’ and gen-
erador de coste as translation of ‘cost driver’
– On some occasions, we offered a Spanish translation equivalent, which is no
longer metaphorical, as well as the English metaphorical terms as synonym of
the translation equivalent. This favours the maintenance of the conceptual sce-
nario and is very useful for decoding: coste indirecto, translation equivalent,
and overhead, synonym, were offered as the Spanish terms of the English
metaphorical term overhead cost.
– On some occasions, the Spanish translation equivalents are examples of lit-
eral renderings that give rise to novel Spanish metaphorical terms whose aes-
thetic value must be preserved in Spanish accounting texts. This procedure
is widespread: The English term rebuilding cost was translated by the Span-
ish novel metaphorical term ‘coste de renovación, ampliación y mejora’ for
rhetorical reasons. Similarly, the English metaphorical term write-down ex-
pense was translated by the Spanish terminological novel metaphor ‘coste de
saneamiento’. The English write-down, which is typically used in accounting
with the meaning of eliminate, is translated by ‘saneamiento’ as we believe
that the aesthetic value of the Spanish saneamiento, i.e., it profiles ‘health’
adds to the conceptual value: we eliminate assets as we intuitively under-

stand that these are toxic assets that we are not going to obtain and therefore
it is necessary to eliminate them and account them as a liability. Also the
English cost smoothing and peanut-butter costing were translated as ‘reparto
uniforme del coste and sistema de coste de crema de cacahuete’ in order to
indicate the conceptual scenario and maintain its aesthetic value as much as
possible. The English metaphorical term step cost was translated literally,
‘coste en escalón’, thus introducing a novel metaphorical term in Spanish
accounting discourse. Similar strategy was used in the translation of stepped
cost ‘coste pronunciado’, sunk cost ‘coste hundido’, and backflush costing
‘sistema de coste retroactivo’.
5. Conclusion
Metaphor has been widely discussed within the disciplines of Translation Stud-
ies and Cognitive Linguistics. Following suit, this chapter has presented the
decisions taken when translating the English Accounting Dictionary into Span-
ish. Our analysis of the Spanish metaphorical translation equivalents has added
to current research on metaphor and translation from a cognitive perspective.
Firstly, terms offer concepts not meanings. This forced us to reproduce the orig-
inal conceptual scenario as much as possible, and to eliminate possible cultural
filters whenever we deemed necessary. Secondly, experts in the field tend to
coin translation terminological equivalents before they are in full display. This
means that we had to rely on different types of corpora – for example, the In-
ternet – in order to find out which solution, if any, had been accorded to source
English metaphorical terms already introduced into Spanish. In practical terms,
we were obliged to adopt solutions such as the maintenance of an English term
as synonym whenever the Spanish term was deemed not totally adequate, either
because it was very general, for example, plusvalı́a for ‘goodwill’, or because
it has lost its aesthetic function. Thirdly, as we are convinced that the concep-
tual and the aesthetic functions play a key role in bilingual terminology we
favoured word-by-word rendering of source English metaphorical terms, a way
of introducing novel metaphors in the target language that has been criticised
as an example of terminological colonialism. However, we consider this prac-
tice adequate and justifiable as it maintains the two previous functions, i.e. the
conceptual and the aesthetic functions.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to El Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación for financial support

(grant FFI2008-01703/FILO)
References
Almagro Esteban, Ana and Marı́a Luisa Pérez Casado
2004 Making the case method work in teaching business English: a case
study. English for Specific Purposes 23 (2): 137–161
Bergenholtz, Henning and Sven Tarp
2003 Two opposing theories: On H.E. Wiegand’s recent discovery of lexi-
cographic functions. Hermes. Journal of Linguistics 31: 171–196.
Bergenholtz, Henning and Sven Tarp
2004 The concept of dictionary usage. Nordic Journal of English Studies 3:
23–36.
Bielenia-Grajewska, Magdalena
2009 The Role of metaphors in the language of investment banking”. In
Special Use on Metaphor and LSP, Micahel White (ed.). Ibérica 17:
139–156.
Brett, Paul
2000 Integrating multimedia into the business English curriculum: a case
study. English for Specific Purposes 19(3): 269–290.
Brutt-Griffler, Janina
2002 World English. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Casanave, Christine Pearson
2010 Case studies. In Continuum Companion to Research Methods in Ap-
plied Linguistics, Brian Paltridge and Aek Phakiti (eds.), 66–79. Lon-
don and New York: Continuum.
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Chesterman, Andrew
2009 The name and nature of Translator Studies. Hermes. Journal of Lan-
guage and Communication Studies 42: 13–22.
Dam, Helle V. and Karen Korning Zethsen
2009 Translation Studies: focus on the translator. Hermes. Journal of Lan-
guage and Communication Studies 42: 7–22.
Dodd, Sarah D.
2002 Metaphors and meaning. A grounded cultural model for US entrepre-
neurship. Journal of Business Venturing 17: 519–535.
Evans, Stephen
2010 Business as usual: The use of English in the professional world in
Hong Kong. English for Specific Purposes 29(3): 153–167.
Flowerdew, Lynne
2010 Devising and implementing a business proposal module. Constraints
and compromises. English for Specific Purposes 29 (2): 108–120.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A.
2009 Systematic introductions in specialised dictionaries. Some proposals
in relation to accounting dictionaries. In Lexicography in the 21st Cen-
tury. In Honour of Henning Bergenholtz, Sandro Nielsen and Sven
Tarp (eds.), 161–178. (Terminology and Lexicography in Research
and Practice 12). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A.
2011 Equivalent selection in specialized e-Lexicography: A case study with
Spanish accounting terms. Lexikos 21: 95–119.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A. and Ascensión Arribas-Baño
2008 Pedagogical Specialised Lexicography. The Representation of Mean-
ing in English and Spanish Business Dictionaries. (Terminology and
Lexicography in Research and Practice 11) Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A. and Sandro Nielsen
2011 The dynamics of terms in accounting: what the construction of the
accounting dictionaries reveals about metaphorical terms in culture-
bound subject fields”. In The Dynamics of Terms in Specialized Com-
munication. An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Rita Temmerman and
M. Van Campenhoudt (eds.). Special Issue ofTerminology 17(1): 157–
180.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A. and Isabel Pizarro-Sánchez
2002 Translation and ‘similarity-creating metaphors’. Target 14 (1): 43–73.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A. and Marisol Velasco Sacristán
2001 The Translatability of metaphor in LSP: application of a decision-
making model. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 14, 73–91.
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A., Marisol Velasco-Sacristán, Ascensión Arribas-Baño and Eva
Samaiego Fernández
2001 Persuasion and Advertising English. Metadiscourse in slogand and
headlines”. Journal of Pragmatics 33(8), 1291–1307.
Fuertes Olivera, Pedro A., Pablo Gordo Gómez, Marta Niño Amo, Angel de los Rios
Rodicio, Angeles Sastre Ruano, Sven Tarp, Marisol Velasco Sacristán y Sandro Nielsen,
Lise Mourier and Henning Bergenholtz. Database and Design: Richard Almind
2010 Diccionario de Contabilidad Inglés-Español. Cizur Menor: Aranzadi
Thomson-Reuters.
Garcı́a Villalón, Julio and Josefina Martı́nez Barbeito
2008 Diccionario Técnico Económico, Financiero actuarial. Valladolid.
Grosse, Christine Ube
1988 The case study approach to teaching business English. English for
Specific Purposes 7 (2): 131–136.
Halliday, M.A.K.
1975 Learning how to Mean. London: Edward Arnold.

1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Meyer, Ingrid, Victoria Zaluski and Kristen Mackintosh
1997 Metaphorical internet terms: A conceptual and structural analysis.
Terminology 4 (1): 1–33.
Nielsen, Sandro
2000 Translation strategies for culture-specific textual conventions in bilin-
gual dictionaries. Lexicographica 16: 152–168.
Nielsen, Sandro and Lise Mourier
2007 Design of a function-based Internet accounting dictionary. In Dic-
tionary Visions, Research and Practice, Henrik and Jens Erik Mo-
gensen (eds.), 119-135. (Terminology and Lexicography in Research
and Practice 10). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nielsen, Sandro, Lise Mourier, and Henning Bergenholtz. Database and design: Richard
Almind
2010 English Accounting Dictionary. http://www.Ordbogen.dk (Last ac-
cessed: July, 2011).
Pragglejaz Group
2007 MIP: a method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse.
Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1–39.
Rogerson-Revell, Pamela
2007 Using English for international business: A European case study.
English for Specific Purposes 26 (1): 103–120.
Rogerson-Revell, Pamela
2008 Participation and performance in international business meetings.
English for Specific Purposes 27 (3): 338–360.
Rojo López, Ana and Marı́a Ángeles Orts Llopis M.A.
2010 Metaphorical patterns analysis in financial texts: Framing the crisis
in positive or negative metaphorical terms. Journal of Pragmatics 42
(12): 3300–3313.
Sager, Juan C.
1997 Term formation. In Handbook ofTerminology Management, vol. I, Sue
Ellen Wright and Gerhard Budin (eds.), 24–41. Amsterdam/Philadel-
phia: John Benjamins.
Samaniego Fernández, Eva
2011 Translation studies and the cognitive theory of metaphor. In Metaphor
and Metonymy Revisited beyond the Contemporary Theory of Meta-
phor: Recent Developments and Applications, Francisvo Gonzálvez-
Garcı́a, Marı́a Sandra Peña Cervel, and Lorena Pérez (eds.). Special
Issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1): 262–279.
Schäffner, Christina
2004 Metaphor and translation: Some implications of a cognitive approach.
Journal of Pragmatics 36 (7): 1253–1269.
Schmidt, Richard
1983 Interaction, acculturation, and acquisition of communicative compe-
tence. In Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Nessa
Wolfson and Elliot Judd (eds.), 137–174. (Series on Issues in Second
Language Research). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Shuttleworth, Mark and Moira Cowie
1997 Dictionary of Translation Studies. Manchester (UK): St. Jerome.
Siqueira, Maity, Ana Flávia Souto de Oliveira, Dalby Dienstbach Hubert, D. Galeno Fae
de Almeida and Larissa Moreira Brangel
2009 Metaphor identification in a terminological dictionary. In Special Use
on Metaphor and LSP, M. White (ed.). Ibérica 17: 157–174.
Skorczynska, Hanna
2010 A Corpus-based evaluation of metaphors in business English text-
books”. English for Specific Purposes 29 (1): 30–42.
Tan, Kim Hua
2009 How effective is the electronic dictionary in sense discrimination.
Lexikos 19: 262–274.
Tarp, Sven
2008 Lexicography in the Borderland between Knowledge and Non-Knowl-
edge. General LexicographicalTheory with Particular Focus on Learn-
er’s Lexicography. (Lexicographica Series Maior, 134).Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag.
Teubert, Wolfgang
2005 Language as an economic factor: The importance of terminology”. In
MeaningfulTexts:The Extraction of Semantic Information from Mono-
lingual and Multilingual Corpora, Geoff Barnbrook, Pernilla Daniels-
son, and Michaela Mahlberg (eds.), 96–106. (Research in Corpus and
Discourse). London & New York: Continuum.
Van Lier, Leo
2005 Case study. In Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching
and Learning, Eli Hinkel (ed.), 195–208. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Van der Meer, Geart
1999 Metaphor and dictionaries: The morass of meaning, or how to get two
ideas for one. International Journal of Lexicography 12 (3)195–208.
Van der Meer, Geart
2010 The treatment of figurative meaning in specialised dictionaries for
learners. In Specialised Dictionaries for Learners, Pedro A. Fuertes-
Olivera (ed.), 131–139. (Lexicographica Series Maior 136). Berlin &
New York: De Gruyter.
Vuorela, Taina
2005 How does a sales team reach goals in intercultural business negotia-
tions? A case study. English for Specific Purposes 24 (1): 65–92.
Walker, Crayton
2009 The treatment of collocations by learners’ dictionaries, collocational
dictionaries and dictionaries of business English. International Jour-
nal of Lexicography 22 (3): 281–299.
White, Michael
2003 Metaphor and economics: The case of growth. English for Specific
Purposes 22 (2): 131–151.
Wolcott, Harry F.
1973 The Man in the Principal’s Office. An Ethnography. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Yin, Robert K.
2003 Case Study Research: Design and Methods (3rd edn.). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications.
The use of verbal and gestural metaphor in
explanations of management theory
Jeannette Littlemore
Abstract
This study investigates how a university lecturer adapted her use of verbal and gestural
metaphor when presenting her ideas to people who were native or non-native speakers
of English from within and outside her discourse community. The findings show that she
used different amounts of metaphor depending on whether or not she was speaking to a
native speaker, and that the gestures accompanying the verbal metaphor served different
functions with different interlocutors. With the non-native speakers the gestures tended to
emphasize the pedagogical functions of the metaphors, whereas with the native speakers
they were more likely to highlight the evaluative functions. In all four exchanges, the
lecturer employed what appeared to be ‘creative’ or ‘deliberate’ gestural metaphors in
response to interjections from the interlocutors and these gestures attracted increased
attention from the interlocutors. This may have been because of an attempt by the speaker
to imbue them with pedagogical force. The non-native speaker interlocutors were more
likely to echo her gestural metaphors, whereas the interlocutors from outside the discourse
community were more likely to echo her verbal metaphors. The findings suggest that in
order to study the functions of metaphor in spoken academic discourse it is necessary to
focus not only on language but also on gesture.
1. Introduction
Increasingly, academics are encouraged both nationally and internationally to

work in more interdisciplinary ways, and to form research teams with scholars
from outside their discipline, some of whom may speak different languages. One
of the biggest challenges, when presenting work to people outside one’s regular
‘discourse community’ (Swales, 2004) or to people with different linguistic
backgrounds, is the need to convey abstract concepts. Abstract concepts are
often expressed through metaphor and the use of metaphor has been found to
abound in disciplines such as economics (Boers, 2000), politics (Mio, 1996),
business (Arleo, 2000; Morgan, 1996), and architecture (Caballero, 2003).
Although metaphor plays an important role in spoken academic discourse
(Low et al, 2008), there has to date been no investigation of the ways in which
176 Jeannette Littlemore
members of discourse communities adapt their use of metaphor when speaking

to people outside the community, or to people with different linguistic back-
grounds. Such a study would be useful as metaphor has been found to serve as
a distinguishing feature of particular discourse communities (Partington, 1998)
and metaphors have their own particular meanings in different genres, registers
and discourses (Cameron, 2003; O’Halloran, 2007; Zinken et al.; 2008). When
speaking to people from outside their regular discourse community academics
may need to adapt the metaphors used, the ways in which they present them or
the functions that they are used to perform.
When examining the use of metaphor in spoken discourse, it is essential to
consider the role of gesture. Gestures and speech are often co-referential and ei-
ther express the same thing or are highly complementary, highlighting different
aspects of the same phenomenon at the same time. Cienki (2008) has observed
that the metaphoricity of apparently ‘dead’ metaphors can be resurrected by the
use of gesture. He has also found that words and gestures can highlight different
aspects of the same source domain, thus providing complementary information,
or they might even bring two different source domains to bear on the same
target domain. Because language and gesture work together to convey partic-
ular metaphorical concepts, it is appropriate to talk about verbal and gestural
metaphor. By studying the interaction between verbal and gestural metaphor,
we can learn a great deal about the ways in which a speaker is metaphorically
‘packaging’ that particular idea in order to convey it in a meaningful way to their
interlocutor.
A type of gestural metaphor that may be particularly important in oral ex-
planations of academic theories is the ‘creative gesture’. Creative gestures have
been described by Cienci and Mittelberg (forthcoming) as:
gestures which are more effortful. . . and as such they require greater involvement
on the part of the speaker/ gesturer in their production; they involve a performative
aspect which can afford additional pragmatic inferencing, for example potentially
serving to elicit a(n) emotive response on the part of the addressee (in prep, p.2).
These are similar to the ‘creative [verbal] metaphors’ that have been found to
emerge in spoken academic discourse when lecturers are required to ‘think on
the spot’ and explain difficult concepts, often in response to questions from
students (Low et al., 2008). In addition to this, the fact that they are so clearly
signalled means that they appear to be the gestural equivalent of what Cameron
(2003) and Steen et al. (2010) describe as ‘deliberate’ [verbal] metaphor. These
are metaphors that appear to be used ‘for a particular purpose on a particular
occasion’ (Cameron, 2003: 101) and are often heavily signalled. By focusing on
these creative (and possibly deliberate) gestures, we can see how lecturers are
The use of verbal and gestural metaphor in explanations of management theory 177
grappling with metaphoric construals of abstract concepts in order to present

them in a coherent and convincing manner to their interlocutors.
Finally, when looking at how academics explain theory to people outside
their fields or to speakers of different languages, it is worth investigating the
ways in which the interlocutors echo the verbal and gestural metaphors used by
the lecturer. In conversation, people have been found to match their use of both
metaphor and gesture to that of their interlocutor (Cameron, 2008; Kangasharju,
1996) so one would expect to see a degree of alignment when looking at a
speaker’s combined use of verbal and gestural metaphor too. Work in the areas of
socio-constructivism (Vygotsky, 1986) and embodied cognition (Gibbs, 2006)
suggests that verbal and gestural metaphors are likely to play a crucial role
in learning and understanding. Indeed, it has been shown that learners often
adopt the metaphors used by their teachers (sometimes wrongly) in order to
help them understand new concepts (Cameron, 2003), and Ritchie (2008) shows
how embodied cognition is involved in the appropriation of metaphoric concepts.
The echoing of verbal and gestural metaphors may also serve an interpersonal
function, as the mirroring of another person’s behaviour can play an important
role in the development of a relationship between the speakers. It is therefore
interesting to look at whether different interlocutors align their use of verbal
and gestural metaphors, and to investigate what the reasons for this alignment
might be.
As far as language learners are concerned, there is evidence to suggest that
they show a strong tendency to attend to the use of gesture by the speaker as it
helps them with listening comprehension. This trait is particularly characteristic
of beginners (Sueyoshi and Hardison, 2005) and of people who are exposed to
language that is completely unknown to them (Tellier, 2006, cited in Gullberg,
2008). Research is also beginning to show that learners are significantly more
likely to remember L2 vocabulary if the teacher accompanies his or her explana-
tions with appropriate gestures (Allen, 1995). The gestures in Allen’s study are
interesting as they include a mixture of iconic gestures (for example, a dancing
gesture to indicate ‘will you dance with me?’), highly culturally conventional
metonymic gestures (e.g. rotating a closed fist on the nose to indicate ‘drunk-
enness’), and metaphorical gestures (e.g. a swimming gesture to indicate being
completely lost or ‘at sea’). Unfortunately, Allen did not focus on the relative
benefits of different types of gesture in her study. One of the aims of this study is
to investigate how students who were from a different linguistic background to
the speaker responded to her use of metaphoric gestures, or as we have chosen
to term them, ‘gestural metaphors’.
We also examine the verbal and gestural metaphors used by the interlocutors
that do not echo those used by the lecturer, as both verbal and gestural metaphor
have been found to play an important role in helping people to develop and
present their ideas. In his ‘information packaging hypothesis’, Kita (2000) ar-
gues that while making the gesture, the speaker is working out, both visually
and linguistically, what information needs to be conveyed and how it can best
be conveyed. The use of gesture may thus help with the production of the appro-
priate linguistic form. One might therefore expect it to be particularly important
for language learners who are learning to produce new linguistic forms. Fur-
thermore, gestural metaphors have also been found to serve as an important
compensation strategy in second language learners (Gullberg, 2008).
The study described in this chapter thus aimed to investigate the ways in
which a British academic (a university lecturer from an International Devel-
opment Department) adapted her use of verbal and gestural metaphors when
explaining two management science models to four different interlocutors: two
native speakers of English (one of whom was in her university department
and one of whom was not) and two non-native speakers of English (one of
whom was in her university department and one of whom was not). Mem-
bership of the university department was chosen to reflect (albeit somewhat
imperfectly) membership of the same discourse community. An International
Development Department was chosen because lecturers working in this field
regularly have to communicate their ideas to people with different linguistic
backgrounds, who work in different fields. Models from Management Science
were chosen because metaphor has been found to be particularly prevalent in
this discipline (Arleo, 2000; Morgan, 1996). The lecturer studied in this chapter
had significant experience and a proven track record in working successfully
with international students and colleagues, so the findings may be useful for
teacher training purposes. The four interlocutors were asked to explain the the-
ories back to the lecturer after they had heard them. The research questions
were:
– How did verbal and gestural metaphor interact in the lecturer’s oral explana-
tions of management theory?
– How did the lecturer vary her use of verbal and gestural metaphor when
explaining the theories to interlocutors from different linguistic backgrounds
and discourse communities?
– To what extent and in what ways did the interlocutors appropriate the lecturer’s
use of verbal and gestural metaphor when explaining the theories back to her?
– To what extent did the interlocutors use gesture to help them structure and com-
municate their own ideas when explaining the theories back to the lecturer?
2. Methodology
The study investigated how the lecturer explained two management models to
four different male interlocutors:
– A native speaker of English from the same discourse community (a British
colleague from the International Development Department)
– A non-native speaker of English from the same discourse community (a
Kazakhstani post-graduate student from the International Development De-
partment)
– A native speaker of English from outside the discourse community (a British
post-graduate student from the English Department)
– A non-native speaker of English from outside the discourse community (a
Taiwanese post-graduate student from the English Department)
None of the participants knew what the aims of the study were. The lecturer
was made aware of the status of each interlocutor. After each explanation, the
interlocutor was asked to explain the theory back to the lecturer. Video record-
ings were made of all four exchanges. The language used in the exchanges was
transcribed according to conversational turns. Words that were uttered with a
particular emphasis or volume were transcribed in capital letters and the ges-
tures were described in a column down the right hand side. Any words that were
being uttered at the time of the gesture were indicated in bold. When the ges-
tures occurred between words, an ˆ was inserted. The Pragglejaz Group (2007)
metaphor identification technique was used to calculate the metaphoric density
of the texts. This technique involves identifying all the lexical units in the text
and then for each lexical unit, establishing whether it has a more basic contem-
porary meaning in other contexts and if so, whether its meaning in the text can
be understood in comparison with this more basic meaning. Basic meanings can
be more concrete, related to bodily action, more precise or historically older. If
this is the case then the lexical unit is marked as being ‘metaphorically-used’.
The metaphoric density of the text is then calculated by dividing the number of
metaphorically used lexical units by the total number of lexical units. A similar
procedure was used to identify metonymically-used words but here contigu-
ity rather than similarity was the main criteria for identification. Because this
technique is less robust, the metonymic density of the texts was not calculated,
but the technique proved useful for identifying metonymy in specific examples.
The metaphorically-used words that are under discussion are underlined in the
extracts cited in this chapter. Metonymically-used items that are under discus-
sion are underlined with a dotted
. . . . . line and similes are underlined with a dashed
line.
Once the metaphoric density had been calculated, an analysis was made of
the lecturer’s use of gesture. The focus was mainly on those gestures that were
co-expressive with, or complementary to, linguistic metaphors, and on those
gestures that contained a strong element of metaphor that was not present in the
text. We followed Müller and Cienki (2009) in that only gestures whose primary
function could be described as abstract reference were counted as metaphorical.
The ways in which the different interlocutors echoed the lecturer’s verbal and
gestural metaphor were also studied. One of the main aims was to identify the
additional information that gesture could provide about the nature and functions
of the verbal metaphors that were used in the four exchanges. It should be noted
that the presence of the video camera in the room may have affected the gestures
used by the interlocutors. When they were asked about this after the session,
the interlocutors claimed that although they had felt very self-conscious at first,
they had forgotten that the camera was there when they became absorbed in the
conversations. However, we cannot rely on this self-report data and must admit
that the presence of the camera, and its potential effects on the speakers, is a
possible drawback of the methodology used in this study.
3. Findings
The models that the management science lecturer chose to present were in them-
selves both metaphorical. They were Quinn et al’s (2001) ‘competing values
framework’ and Stewart’s ‘fried egg’ (1999) model of responsibility. The lec-
turer prepared for the session by drawing a diagram of each model on a flipchart,
before the arrival of the interlocutors:
Figure 1. The two diagrams drawn by the lec-

turer on the flip chart in preparation for the ses-
sions (The words in the top diagram, starting at
the top and moving clockwise are: ‘decentral-
ized’, ‘open systems’, ‘outward focus’, ‘goal-
oriented’, ‘centralized’, ‘bureaucracy’, ‘inward
focus’, and ‘human relations’. The words in the
bottom diagram are ‘constraints’, ‘choice’ and
‘demands’).
The ‘competing values framework’ is a way of describing different types of

organisations in terms of how centralized or decentralized they are, and how
inward or outward-focused they are. The combination of these two axes gives
rise to four quadrants which are labelled ‘bureaucracy’, ‘human relations’, open
systems’ and ‘goal oriented’. Each of these corresponds to a particular type of
organisation. In line with conceptual metaphor theory and visual semiotics, there
is movement in the diagram from bottom left to top right as the system becomes
increasingly open and outward looking. According to conceptual metaphor the-
ory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) good is up and bad is down, and work in visual
semiotics has shown that given or known information is usually presented on
the left whilst new information is usually presented on the right (Kress and van
Leeuwen, 1996).
The ‘fried eggs’ model of responsibility looks at the same issue from the
perspective of someone working within an organisation. Their working condi-
tions are illustrated through the picture of two fried eggs. In each case, the ‘yolk’
of the egg corresponds to the demands that their boss makes on them and the
‘white’ corresponds to the degree of freedom that they are allowed within the
organisation.
Descriptive data of the four exchanges are provided in Table 1 (in this table
they are presented in the order in which the exchanges took place).
Table 1. Word counts and metaphoric densities in each of the four exchanges
Exchange Exchange Exchange Exchange
with the na- with the na- with the with the
tive speaker tive speaker non-native non-native
from outside from within speaker from speaker from
the discourse the discourse within the outside the
community community discourse discourse
community community
Number of 5047 3185 3881 2818
words
Number of 922 500 423 352
metaphorically-
used words
Metaphoric 18.3% 15.7% 10.9% 12.5%
density
As we can see from this table, the exchanges with the interlocutors from the
speaker’s own department were longer than those with the interlocutors from
outside the department, and the word counts were correspondingly higher. There
was also some variation in the metaphoric density, with the lecturer using
markedly fewer verbal metaphors with the non-native speakers than with the
native speakers. When we look below at the gestural metaphors that accompa-
nied these verbal metaphors, we will see even more variation, particularly in
terms of the functions that the gestural metaphors were used to perform. In the
next section we compare the lecturer’s use of gestural metaphors in the four ex-
changes. The exchanges are presented in the order with which they occurred, as
each exchange had a certain amount of influence on the subsequent exchanges.
As we will see below, a different pattern emerged with each interlocutor1 .
4. A native speaker of English from outside the discourse community
The first exchange was with a native speaker of English who was a post-graduate
student of linguistics. This exchange was characterised by a substantial amount
of gestural metaphor, which was primarily used to serve an evaluative function.
The lecturer made repeated use of a number of gestural metaphors that recurred
throughout the exchange. The gestures did not always mean the same thing but
displayed a certain amount of polysemy, a finding which mirrors the pervasive-
ness of lexical repetition that has been observed in conversational discourse
(Thornbury and Slade, 2006), and shows the extent to which lexical repetition
is polysemous.
Let us begin by looking at one of the gestural metaphors that appeared to
serve an evaluative function:
Lecturer It doesn’t matter

em. . . they’ll be thinking about. . .
what is important here
it’s about consolidation and continuity
and keeping everything
seriously under control lh swift downward
very stable clenched fist motion 04:43
1. The exchanges with the native speakers are discussed in relation to genre and reg-
ister in Deignan, Littlemore and Semino (forthcoming) and the exchanges with the
non-native speakers are discussed in relation to the lecturer’s own reflections on the
interaction in Littlemore et al. (forthcoming).
This gesture, which contains elements of the stability is down conceptual

metaphor appears to have added an element of evaluation that was not present
in the words by virtue of the fact that the hand was formed into a fist. Müller and
Cienki (2009) divide metaphoric gestures into those that express propositional
content and those that perform a ‘meta-communicative act’. The fact that this
gesture appears to convey mainly pragmatic content suggests that falls into this
second category. Indeed, many of the gestures that the lecturer used with this
particular interlocutor appeared to fall into this category.The fact that the lecturer
used her left hand may also be significant here. In line with other research in
the field of gesture studies (e.g. Calbris, 2008), she tended to use her left (non-
dominant) hand to indicate negative evaluations and her right (dominant) hand
to indicate more positive evaluations. She made the same gesture a few seconds
later, with her fingers not so tightly closed, to indicate the same thing. This
corresponds to a phenomenon that Cienki and Mittelberg (forthcoming) have
identified whereby a speaker uses a strong gesture then makes a weaker version
of the same gesture later in the speaking which serves as a kind of metonymic
anaphoric reference.
The lecturer then went on to explain the four quadrants of the model, illus-
trating each quadrant by relating it to a particular boss from her department,
and running through the history of the department in terms of the characters of
these four bosses. The discourse entered a kind of ‘narrative’ phase as she went
through the history of her various bosses and she clearly had strong feelings
towards each of them, which were heavily conveyed through her use of gesture.
This narrative served a strong pedagogical function as it grounded the abstract
theory in a real situation that other people might be able to relate to. It was in
this part of the exchange where she used most gestural metaphors, and again
many of these gestural metaphors served to reinforce the evaluative component
of her message. For example, her negative evaluation of the ‘goal-oriented’ boss
was portrayed as follows:
(x3)
Lecturer And then we were taken over
By someone who was VERY goal-oriented lh open palm moving away
And suddenly we had systems for everything from chest
And targets and targets and targets lh open handed chopping
motion left hand (x3)
Throughout this sequence, she used her left hand to signal her negative evalua-
tion of the boss. The first gesture also appeared to indicate that she would have
liked to distance herself from this boss, or perhaps even push him away. Deixis
was thus present in the gesture but not in the words. The chopping motion, which
was repeated three times, reflected the repetition in the words, serving to rein-
force the strong, negative evaluation of this boss’s priorities. The combination
of metaphoric words and gestures in this extract conveys the impression that he
was too single minded, and obsessed with a single idea (that of ‘targets’).
The lecturer then compared this boss with the previous boss, pointing to
the corresponding segments of the model. Although it was not a main focus
of our study, the fact that the ‘positive’ systems were at the top of the diagram
and the ‘negative’ ones at the bottom acquired a heightened significance, when
we studied the pitch of the lecturer’s intonation at this point. The ‘first’ boss
was described using relatively high pitched intonation and the second boss was
described using relatively low pitched intonation. Both the gesture and the into-
nation appeared to correspond to the conceptual metaphor good is up and bad
is down (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003):
Lecturer Actually we made loads of moneyˆ when this

... rh taps quadrant at top of
boss was in charge board
rh points to quadrant at bot-

And we lost money ˆ when this
. . . boss was in tom of board
charge lh makes pinching gesture
Too much control see? with left hand and wriggles
fingers
The pinching gesture that she made with her left hand appeared to contain both
metonymy (the hand for control) and metaphor (control is holding). This serves
as a good demonstration of a phenomenon that Mittelberg and Waugh (2009:
329) describe whereby metonymy ‘leads the way into metaphor’. That is to say,
in all iconic and metaphorical gesture the hand metonymically represents the
object that is being referred to. This is sometimes extended metaphorically to
refer to abstract concepts. In our example, there is a meta-communicative act

in that the tightness of the lecturer’s fingers and the smallness of the gesture
added an extra evaluative element, implying that this boss may have also been
somewhat small-minded and obsessed with detail. The words and gestures thus
appear to have provided complementary forms of evaluation.
At this point, the interlocutor asked her to explain ‘inward’ and ‘outward-
looking’ organisations. This gave rise to an interesting series of gestures:
Student: S: can you talk a little more about inwards and

outwards-focused?
Lecturer: Yeah. . . outward-focused is about looking at
the market outward wave with rh
Looking at the market and
Looking at what’s happening removes glasses
Stares towards camera
Although the use of the word ‘looking’ in this context may be seen as a ‘dead
metaphor’ by many analysts, the fact that she took of her glasses and stared
pointedly into the distance at this point significantly heightened the metaphoric-
ity of the word. The fact that the lecturer used this apparently deliberate gesture
in direct response to a question from the interlocutor indicates that it may have
served a pedagogical function.
The following gesture also appeared to serve a more pedagogical function:
Lecturer what kind of training

what kind of education
what kind of degrees do people want
and then .you
. . kind of adjust .yourself
...... Hands wriggle upwards
to produce that sort of product or service (body wriggling slightly too)
Interestingly, this idea of ‘adjusting yourself’ contained strong elements of per-

sonification and embodiment. In order to explain how organisations have to
adjust themselves, it was almost as if she had metaphorically ‘become’ the or-
ganisation and was adjusting herself as she spoke. Interestingly, whereas the
interlocutor had been looking mainly at the white board rather than the lecturer
up until now, he focused all his attention on the lecturer at this point. This may
have been because she appeared to be ‘trying harder’with this gestural metaphor
than with some of her previous ones. She exhibited expansiveness and increased
effort with this gesture, which as we saw above, Cienki and Mittelberg (forth-
coming) have identified as indicators of a ‘creative gesture’. In addition to this,
the fact that she also used the words ‘kind of’ to introduce the verbal component
of the metaphor, and this was the first metaphor that had been signalled in this
way means that it may be more useful, in this pedagogical context, to view it as
an instance of ‘deliberate’ metaphor (Cameron, 2003; Steen et al., 2010). The
use of signalling devices and the increased attention from the interlocutor ap-
pear to indicate that both verbally and gesturally this was a particularly salient,
or even ‘deliberate’ metaphor.
There was very little evidence of echoing by this interlocutor. When he
did talk about the model, he employed very few gestures and those that he
did use were different from the ones used by the lecturer. The only similarity
was the fact that he pointed to different quadrants of the model in the same
way as the lecturer had done. On the other hand, he did echo a great deal of
her metaphoric language (e.g. ‘inward’ and ‘outward focus’). There was also
an interesting piece of echoing by the lecturer herself. At one point this student
talked about his experience of being in the army in relation to closed, bureaucratic
systems, and he described it as being ‘like a prison’. The lecturer made use of this
same analogy, not with him but with a subsequent interlocutor (the non-native
speaking student from the same discourse community) when describing rigid
organisations. This is interesting as it suggests that she had taken his metaphor
on board and used it to structure her own thinking. Because she used it with a
different interlocutor, it appeared to serve more of a cognitive than a relationship-
building function.
To sum up, in this exchange the lecturer made substantial use of metaphor in
both her words and gestures, particularly during the narrative/illustrative phase
of the exchange. Many of the gestures used in the exchange conveyed strong
evaluative content. There were several clusters of gestural metaphors, drawing
on different source domains, all contributing to her rich and varied evaluations of
each of the bosses. The gestures and the words appeared to tell two interweaving
stories that together presented powerful images of these bosses.
5. A native speaker of English from the same discourse community
The second exchange took place between the lecturer and a native speaker who
was a colleague of hers from the same department. This was shortest of the four
exchanges, lasting around twenty-one minutes and in comparison with the pre-
vious exchange there was less gestural metaphor. She explained the competing
values framework again by referring to four specific bosses in her department,
relating each quadrant of the framework to one of the four bosses. The fact that
she was referring to people they both knew allowed her to make substantial
use of metonymy in this exchange. This metonymy appeared to serve various
evaluative and interpersonal, as well as ideational functions. She employed a lot
more humour, and used verbal and gestural metaphors that would only make
sense to someone who shared a great deal of background knowledge, as we can
see in the following example:
Lecturer and then [name] took over

And [name] was dyslexic
very creative
he’s a small boy
with toffees in his pockets Waves each hand low down
there’s conkers in these trees close to waist
and you kind of get them Twists and picks air with lh
and he’s got no method
no systems
no nothing
controlling him at all
he just goes with the wind Sweeps rh upwards away
from body
This whole scenario, which she presented in the present tense, appeared to serve
as a kind of analogy to emphasise the childish nature of this boss. The references
to conkers appeared to reflect a cognitive blend of childhood innocence with the
need to get contracts (but only if they were easily accessible). The scenario was
very loose and could be interpreted in a number of different ways. Presumably
the fact that they had both known this person aided understanding. The scenario
also involved a degree of metonymic shorthand that relied on a substantial
amount of shared knowledge.
There was also an interesting use of humour between them that involved the
reliteralization of a metaphor:
Lecturer I’m not sure where [name] is

Colleague He’s on holiday at the moment [laughs]ˆ Flashes rh towards board
Lecturer As usual
He doesn’t appear on the map at all Moves rh towards board
He’s sort of erm
He’s sort of gone right through
And come out the other side Pulls rh out from behind
board
The humour here involved the use of a ‘twice true’ metaphor that was true both
literally and figuratively (Cohen, 1976). The boss in question could not be located
on the diagram or in real life, as he was on holiday. We can see from their body
language that this brief exchange served a strong relationship-building function.
This was the only interlocutor with whom the lecturer used humour of this sort
and it appeared to have been initiated by the interlocutor. It was accompanied
by what appeared to be another example of a potentially ‘deliberate’ gesture.
This involved a ‘burst of activity’ (when she metaphorically ‘pulled’ the boss
out through the back of the flip chart), which was signalled explicitly, and which
attracted the attention of the interlocutor.
As with the previous interlocutor, she made frequent use of gestures that
appeared to add an evaluative dimension, and which might thus be said to be
performing a meta-communicative act, rather than adding significant proposi-
tional content (Müller and Cienki, 2009), as we can see in the following example:
Lecturer xxxx was great for me

xxxx was awful for me
Because I don’t think that way Brushes lh to the side
And I think
And I think
It’s wrong you know
Here she appeared to push the ‘way of thinking’ away from her body and the
extract provides another example of how she used her left hand more often to
indicate negative evaluation.
Again, the interlocutor did not echo any of the gestures used by the lecturer.
Nor did he echo any of the linguistic metaphors. He ended by giving a long
description of his ideal working environment in which he used the metaphor
‘comes from your heart’ accompanied by a gesture in which he placed his hand
on his chest. Interestingly, the lecturer used this gesture twice with the following
speaker though she imbued it with a slightly different meaning, using it to talk
about herself. She had not used this gesture at all, up until this point.
To sum up, verbal and gestural metaphor in this exchange were used pri-
marily to express evaluation and humour. Much of the humour was achieved by
re-literalizing metaphoric abstract concepts. There was also substantial use of
metonymy, which required a high degree of shared knowledge and experience.
The interlocutor did not echo any of the verbal metaphors used by the lecturer.
6. A non-native speaker of English from the same discourse community
The third interlocutor was a non-native speaking post-graduate student from the
same department as the lecturer. This exchange was different from those that
took place with the native speakers in that it was characterized by a substan-
tial use of gesture that appeared to express propositional content (Müller and
Cienki, 2009) and which often appeared to serve a pedagogical, rather than an
evaluative function. There was substantially less humour in the exchange. The
gestures were very expansive and were accompanied by strong eye contact with
the interlocutor, suggesting that the lecturer was using them to facilitate the
interlocutor’s understanding of the linguistic content. Examples of such ‘peda-
gogical gestures’include the following, which were used to illustrate the contrast
between ‘freedom’ and ‘closeness’:
Lecturer It’s not so centralised. . .

They’ve got a lot of freedom l/rhs flash in air
But they’re very close to each other Hands cross in a ‘hugging’
gesture
And when talking about ‘new things’, she swept her right hand into the air.
Lecturer responding to you know

building new things rh moves rapidly outwards,
responding to new trends palm open
et cetera. (3.02)
And she illustrated the word ‘underpinning’ with a highly illustrative gesture
with corresponded to a more basic sense of the word.
Lecturer motivations er involved

underpinning these different quadrants rh palm up, claw shape, fin-
gers move in and out twice
She then removed her glasses gesture to illustrate ‘looking’, as she had done
with the first interlocutor:
Lecturer So if we’re looking at organisations

ând if you’re thinking about Takes off glasses
looking
. . . . . . for jobs Spreads hands wide, palms up
it’s quite a nice idea to think about
what sort of organization
you’d want to be working for
The fact that she removed her glasses to emphasise a metaphor with two different
interlocutors suggests that it is not a coincidence, and possibly provides evidence
for an embodied representation of metaphors that involve ‘looking’.
To sum up, these gestures indicate that the lecturer may have been more
concerned with ideational content than with evaluation. Her pace was slightly
slower with him than with the previous two speakers and these exaggerated,
pedagogic gestures appear to have been designed to facilitate comprehension.
She also stared quite openly at the interlocutor’s face when using these gestures
as if looking for a signal that he had understood what she was trying to say.
This interlocutor adopted the gestures used by the lecturer more than either
of the two native-speaker interlocutors, but we cannot necessarily attribute this
to ‘appropriation’, as he may have simply been accommodating to her ideas,
given the unequal power relationship in the dyad. Among his various gestures
that resembled those used by the lecturer were, the use of a thumping gesture to
accompany the expression ‘bureaucratic machine’:
Student our government is highly centralised Both fists clench

a bureaucratic machine rh thumping gesture
but as everywhere
it depends where there are some options
that I can sense
Interestingly, none of the metaphorically used words in this extract had been
used by the lecturer although she had used similar words to talk about these
concepts.
As well as echoing the gestures used by the lecturer, he also made use of
some gestures that appeared to help him formulate his ideas. For example, he
appeared to use a metonymic gesture to help him recall the words ‘techniques’
and ‘efforts’:
Student like in keeping us with erm

how can I sayˆ Hands alternate, facing each
techniques, efforts other fingers apart palms
it’s really helpful facing downwards
for working
The gesture occurred before the production of the vocabulary items and seemed
to predict his use of words that are concerned with ‘doing things with one’s
hands’. The fact that these words were uttered with more force suggests that
he had put more thought into their retrieval or into the formulation of the con-
cepts that they represented. He may therefore have been using the gesture to
help him develop his idea and express it appropriately. Littlemore and Ngan-
Ying Kwong (in press) showed that whereas the gestures used by native speak-
ers tend to co-occur with the corresponding lexical items, those used by non-
native speakers tend to occur beforehand, indicating that non-native speakers
are somewhat more likely to use gesture to help formulate their ideas and pack-
age them into target-language vocabulary (Krauss et al., 1996). In order to aid
the conceptualization process, he may have been making use of an ontologi-
cal metaphor whereby abstract nouns (techniques and efforts) are temporarily
construed as a concrete phenomenon (the thing that he was ‘feeling’ with his
hands).
To sum up, when talking to this interlocutor, the lecturer appeared to use
gestures that expressed propositional content rather than fulfilling an evaluative
function. They appeared to be more ‘pedagogical’ and exaggerated than those
that she had used with the native-speaker interlocutors. One of their main func-
tions seemed to be to awaken the metaphoricity of the language that she was
using in order to facilitate comprehension. The interlocutor was more likely
to echo her use of gesture when explaining things back to her, but he did not
employ any of the metaphorically-used words that had been used by the lec-
turer.
7. A non-native speaker of English from outside the discourse

community
The fourth interlocutor, a non-native speaker post-graduate student of linguistics,

was the ‘furthest away’ from the lecturer in terms of L1 background and dis-
course community membership. With this interlocutor, the lecturer again made
substantial use of gesture to accompany words that were potentially metaphoric,
and again many of the gestures appeared to serve a ‘pedagogic’function. The lec-
turer was constantly searching the interlocutor’s face for signs of understanding,
as we can see in the following extract:
Lecturer I don’t mean hold on Tight holding gesture (both

to the money hands)
I mean you know
invest et cetera. Both hands move outwards
they have to be quite politically astute. from chest, palms open
and good at getting grants . . . and . . .
pulling in the money . . . all that sort of thing. rh pulling action
Here, her gestures corresponded very closely to the basic senses of the metaphors
employed. For reasons of space I will not show all of the ‘pedagogic gestures’
used, but basically the lecturer’s use of verbal and gestural metaphor was very
similar to those that she had used with the other non-native speaker of English,
and the gestures were rather different from those she had used with the two native
speakers of English. This suggests that she perhaps perceived the interlocutor’s
linguistic background to be of more importance than his membership of the
discourse community when deciding how to adapt her gesture sequence.
Again, many of the gestures used by the interlocutor were similar to those
used by the lecturer, as we can see in the examples below which involved gestures
that had previously been used by the lecturer herself:
Lecturer it was like money is sort of energy . . . Hands closed together

Student you know . . .
Lecturer Hm hm (nodding)
Student and if you keep it moving . . . . . . .round
..... Expansive waving of both hands
Lecturer ˆ . . . it works
Student Right yeah
but if you put . . . .it. .in. .a. box
... Hands come together
and
. . . . . . . . .it
count
it doesn’t do anything.
Hm hm (nodding)
Immediately afterwards, the student produced the following commentary in

which he appeared to have appropriated the lecturer’s gestures:
Student: like er . . . you know . . .

sometimes we say you know
the rich people become rich Both hands palms
because they have the money as their res-resources? . . . open rotating ges-
they can use it to . . . er . . . to invest in a lot of () ture
and earn money back from that
but . . . some people they are not that rich
and keep on working and they don’t use this money Hands still rotat-
to . . . for investments ing come much
so they don’t get more money back closer together
they just . . .
What he appeared to be echoing here was the idea of ‘going from something
large to something small’, although the actual gestures themselves were some-
what different. The gestures appear to correspond to a conceptual metaphor of
openness and closedness to represent the different ways of dealing with money
and the different attitudes that one might have towards it.
This interlocutor was more likely than any of the other three interlocutors
to echo both her words and her gestures, often immediately after she had used
them herself, as we can see in the following example:
Lecturer and for me

it was so frightening
to let go . . . giving gesture with both hands
of control. 17:19
Student I think . . . if you let go of the control Giving gesture with both hands
a little bit by little bit 17:23
gradually
I think . . . you won’t worry that much
but if you do it suddenly Hands spread out palms facing
just like . . . you really keep control of them each other
from you know up until fifteen . . .
you will worry much more.
Thus we can see that when speaking to the non-native interlocutor from out-
side the discourse community, the lecturer was more likely to use ‘pedagogical’
gestures and to keep humour, strong evaluation and metonymy to a minimum.
The interlocutor was more likely to echo her use of both the words and the
gestures when describing the theories back to her. It is not entirely clear why he
did this. It could be that it was a part of the learning process (he was learning
both new language and new concepts), or it could have served an interpersonal
relationship-building function, perhaps linked to the unequal power relationship
between them. It may also have indicated a lack of confidence on the part of the
interlocutor who preferred to stick closely to the metaphoric construals provided
by the lecturer.
8. Discussion
In this study, we have seen that verbal and gestural metaphor interacted in differ-
ent ways in the lecturer’s explanations of management theory models. At times
the metaphoricity of the expression was intensified by the use of gesture, and at
times the gestures contained an element of metaphoricity that was not present
in the corresponding text. A good example of this was when the lecturer formed
her hand into a fist and made a downwards thumping motion to illustrate ‘keep-
ing everything seriously under control’. There was also evidence of ‘creative’
or ‘deliberate’ gestural metaphor, indicated by the increased use of signalling
by the lecturer and increased attention from the interlocutor. A good example of
this was the wriggling body which accompanied the words: ‘and then you kind
of adjust yourself’. These gestures appeared to involve embodiment and to be
used when the lecturer was trying to find new ways to present her ideas.
There was evidence of variation in terms of the amount of gestural metaphor
used with the different interlocutors and in the functions that it was used to
perform. In particular, the lecturer appeared to adjust her use of verbal and
gestural metaphor when speaking to non-native speakers. She used fewer verbal
metaphors, but more pedagogical gestural metaphors with the non-native speak-
ers than with the native speakers. She may have felt that these words would be
potentially problematic for the non-native speakers, which may be why she used
gestures to illustrate their basic senses. With the native speakers, her gestures
tended to be more evaluative.
It is more difficult to judge whether or not an interlocutor’s membership of the
discourse community made much difference to the lecturer’s use of verbal and
gestural metaphors. Although the study was originally designed to include two
members of the discourse community, it is clear that her use of metaphor with the
colleague was very different from her use of verbal and gestural metaphor with
the post-graduate student from her department. With the colleague, she made
a number of metonymic references to shared knowledge, many of which were
accompanied by gesture. She also used metaphor and metonymy for humorous
effect. Care thus needs to be taken when defining ‘discourse community mem-
bership’. For this lecturer, the fact that one of the interlocutors was a colleague
had a noticeable effect on her use of verbal and gestural metaphor, and whether
or not the interlocutor was working in the same field as her appeared not to have
made that much difference.
The gestures were more likely to be echoed by the non-native speakers than by
the native speakers. This may have reflected a learning process but it may equally
have been due to the fact that imitation tends to serve a relationship-building
function, especially when there are differences in terms of status between the
speakers. The metaphorically-used words were more likely to be echoed by the
two interlocutors from outside the discourse community. These findings indicate
a role for imitation of both verbal and gestural metaphor in the learning process.
More research is needed to establish whether or not this is a more widespread
phenomenon. Contrary to expectations, the lecturer herself appeared to appropri-
ate some of the metaphors and gestures employed by the different interlocutors
and went on to use them with subsequent interlocutors. This reflects the fact that
learning and appropriation are two-way processes.
It should be borne in mind that this has been a qualitative exploratory study
and we do not know how far these findings can extrapolated to lecturers in other
disciplines talking to different interlocutors. This lecturer was particularly adept
at speaking to international students and to people from outside her own dis-
course community. It would be interesting to see what sort of changes would be
made by a lecturer who had less experience in this area. It would also be inter-
esting to explore the effects of gender, age, cultural background and personality
in similar settings and thus identify patterns of behaviour that extend beyond
the individuals participating in this study. On the other hand, the findings made
in this study indicate that lecturers do appear to adapt their use of verbal and
gestural metaphor in response to the levels of linguistic competence, expertise
and topic familiarity that they perceive in their interlocutors.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would also like to thank the participants for their willingness
to take part in this study. I would also like to thank James Turner for transcribing
the data and Fiona MacArthur and Dan Malt for their valuable comments on the
manuscript.
References
Allen, Linda Quinn
1995 The effect of emblematic gestures on the development and access
of mental representations of French expressions, Modern Language
Journal, 79 (4): 521–9.
Arleo, Andrew
2000 Life cycles, chaos and zoom lenses: a comparative analysis of some
conceptual metaphors in the discourse of entrepreneurship theory.
Anglais Scientifique, 27 (30): 19–31.
Boers, Frank
2000 Enhancing metaphoric awareness in specialised reading. English for
Specific Purposes, 19 (1): 137–147.
Caballero, Rosario
2003 Metaphor and genre:The presence and role of metaphor in the building
review. Applied Linguistics, 24 (2) 145–167.
Calbris, G.
2008 From left to right. . . : coverbal gestures and their symbolic use of space.
In Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller (eds.) Metaphor and Gesture.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 27–53.
Cameron, Lynne
2003 Metaphor in Educational Discourse. London: Continuum.
Cameron, Lynne
2008 Metaphor Shifting in the Dynamics of Talk. Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins.
Cienki, Alan
2008 Why study metaphor and gesture? In Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller
(eds.) Metaphor and Gesture, 5–26, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cienki, Alan and Irene Mittelberg
f.c. Creativity in the forms and functions of spontaneous gesture. Unpub-
lished Manuscript.
Cohen, Thomas
1976 Notes on metaphor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 34
(3): 249–259.
Deignan, Alice, Jeannette Littlemore and Elena Semino
f.c. Figurative Language, Genre and Register. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gibbs, Raymond
2006 Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Gullberg, Marianne
2008 Gestures and second language acquisition. In Peter Robinson and Nick
Ellis (eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Lingistics and Second Language
Acquisition, 276–305, London: Routledge.
Kangasharju, Helena
1996 Aligning as a team in multiparty conversation. Journal of Pragmatics
26: 291–319.
Kita, Sotaro
2000 How representational gestures help speaking. In David McNeill. (ed.)
Language and Gesture, 162–185, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Krauss, Robert, Yihsiu Chen and Purnima Chawla
1996 Nonverbal behavior and nonverbal communication: What do conver-
sational hand gestures tell us? In Mark Zanna (ed.), Advances in Ex-
perimental Social Psychology, 389–450. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen
1996 Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge
Littlemore, Jeannette and Rico Ngan-Ying Kwong
in press The use of metaphoric gestures by first and second language learners: a
comparative case study, In Constanze Juchem-Grundman and Susanne
Niemeier (eds.) Seeing is Knowing: Metaphor Teaching in English
Language Education, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Littlemore, Jeannette, Fiona MacArthur, Annie Rubienska and James Turner
f.c. Communicating academic content to international students: Interplay
and variations in the use of verbal and gestural metaphor. In Ana
Roldan and Silvia Molina (eds.) New Perspectives on Genre and Spe-
cialized Discourse.
Low, Graham, Jeannette Littlemore and Almut Koester
2008 The use of metaphor in three university lectures. Applied Linguistics
29 (3): 428–455.
Mio, Jeffrey Scott
1996 Metaphor, politics and persuasion. In Jeffrey Scott Mio and Albert
Katz (eds.) Metaphor: Implications and Applications, 127–146, New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Mittelberg, Irene and Linda Waugh
2009 Metonymy first, metaphor second: A cognitive-semiotic approach to
multimodal figures of thought and co-speech gesture. In Charles
Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds.) Multimodal Metaphor,
330–356, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Morgan, Gareth
1996 Images of Organization. London: Sage Publications.
Müller, Cornelia and Alan Cienki
2009 Words, gestures, and beyond: Forms of multimodal metaphor in the use
of spoken language. In Charles Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi
(eds.) Multimodal Metaphor, 297–328, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
O’Halloran, Kieran
2007 Critical discourse analysis and the corpus-informed interpretation of
metaphor at the register level. Applied Linguistics, 28 (1): 1–24.
Partington, Alan
1998 Patterns and Meanings. Using Corpora for English Language Re-
search and Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Com-
pany.
Pragglejaz Group
2007 A practical and flexible method for identifying metaphorically-used
words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1–40.
Quinn, Robert, Herbert Hildebrandt, Priscilla Rogers and Michael Thompson
2001 A Competing Values Framework for Analyzing Presentational Com-
munication in Management Contexts, Journal of Business Communi-
cation, 28 (3): 213–232.
Ritchie, David
2008 X IS A Journey: Embodied simulation in metaphor interpretation.
Metaphor and Symbol, 23: 173–199.
Steen, Gerard, Aletta Dorst, Berenike Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr and Trintje
Pasma
2010 A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU,
Stewart, Rosemary
1999 The Reality of Management. San Diego: Elsevier Science and Tech-
nology Books.
Sueyoshi, Ayano and Debra Hardison
2005 The role of gestures and facial cues in second language listening com-
prehension, Language Learning, 55 (4): 661–99.
Swales, John
2004 Research Genres: Exploration and applications. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Tellier, Marion
2006 L’impact du geste pedagogique sue l’enseignement/apprentissage des
languages etrangeres: Etude sur des enfants de 5 ans University Paris
VII- Denis Diderot (cited in Gullberg, 2008).
Thornbury, Scott and Diane Slade
2006 Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Vygotsky, Lev
1986 Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zinken, Jörg, Lina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich
2008 Discourse metaphors. In Roslyn Frank, Rene Dirven, Tom Ziemke and
Enrique Bernárdez (eds) Body, Language and Mind. Vol. II. Sociocul-
tural Situatedness, 363–385, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
“Bigger, a lot bigger, massively much bigger”:
A comparative study of hyperbole in business and
economics lectures
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
Abstract
Hyperbole is a common feature of everyday conversation through which speakers exag-

gerate reality for affective and evaluative purposes. Hyperbolic uses of certain lexico-
grammatical items have also been found in academic speech, where they might have been
less expected. Continuing in this direction, this study investigates hyperbole in university
lectures in the fields of business and economics. These disciplines are typically associ-
ated with empirical data and methodological precision, which could constrain hyperbole.
Yet today’s academic lectures have become increasingly conversation-like, which could
instead favour hyperbole. This potential mismatch renders business and economics lec-
tures particularly interesting for an in-depth study of this form of figurative language.
Using techniques from corpus linguistics, three types of hyperbole were investigated in
six business lectures and six economics lectures: extreme adjectives and adverbs, e.g.,
huge, absolutely, never, overgeneralization, e.g., everybody, no one and numerical exag-
geration, e.g., millions, loads, tonnes. Follow-up qualitative analysis was performed to
gain insights into the patterning and functions of hyperbole in these disciplinary settings.
Although not in high frequencies, extreme adjectives and adverbs were found across both
corpora, while overgeneralization and especially numerical exaggeration were relatively
infrequent. The use of hyperbole in the two corpora was linked to various discourse
functions including emphasis, persuasion, humour, criticism and irony. The findings can
be implemented towards developing more effective teaching methods and materials that
raise awareness among non-native speakers of English of how hyperbole may be used by
business and economics lecturers.
1. Introduction
Interest in hyperbole as a figure of speech can be traced back to the times of

Aristotle. In his influential work Rhetoric, hyperbole was introduced as a device
that is used for the purpose of exaggeration or overstatement. In the philoso-
pher’s quaint old-world view, hyperbole is most suitable for the speech of “young
202 Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
men” who show “vehemence of character”, and also used often by “angry peo-
ple”.1 Since classical times, the study of hyperbole has often been undertaken
within the framework of literary analysis and stylistics (cf. Arac 1979; Ruiz
Sánchez 2000; Gibbels 2005; Stanivukovich 2007). However, hyperbole has
also been investigated from a cognitive perspective to better understand the
mental processes involved in its comprehension (Gibbs et al. 1993). Similarly,
some psycholinguistic research has shed light on how hyperbole is perceived as
a form of non-literal language, as well as the pragmatic functions that it may
accomplish (e.g., Colston and Keller 1998; Colston and O’Brien 2000). In an
experiment that instead focused on the motivations underlying the use of hy-
perbolic language, Roberts and Kreuz (1994:161) identified several discourse
goals, including “to emphasize”, “to be humorous”, “to clarify, “to add inter-
est” and “to provoke thought”. Such studies are revealing of how hyperbole
permeates human communication on a variety of levels.
An important strand of scholarly work on hyperbole has concentrated on how
it is used in naturally-occurring everyday conversation. This has provided a more
articulated profile of hyperbole as a figure of speech, which is closely linked
to the interactional dimension of communication. According to McCarthy and
Carter (2004), hyperbole can be distinguished into two types of exaggeration:
expansions or magnifications of reality, e.g., a colossal house, and reductions or
minimizations of reality, e.g., a pea-sized brain, neither of which are intended
to be taken literally. In a large-scale study based on the five-million word can-
code corpus of spoken conversational English, these authors identified a series
of semantic fields in which hyperbolic expressions tend to appear, including
numerical quantifiers, e.g., millions, mass quantifiers, e.g., loads, and extreme
adjectives and adverbs, e.g., gigantic, endless. These items were typically used
to encode interpersonal meanings involving humour, affect, solidarity, infor-
mality and persuasion. Cano Mora (2009) analyzed hyperbole in conversational
data extracted from the British National Corpus and classified occurrences into
two major semantic fields (evaluation and quantity), as well as a set of richly
articulated sub-fields. On the whole, quantitative hyperbole was more frequent
than evaluative hyperbole. In addition, negative evaluation was more prominent
than positive evaluation, suggesting that exaggeration is more common when
expressing negative attitudes.
Hyperbole has also been described in terms of extreme case formulations
(Pomerantz 1986), i.e., expressions that use the most extreme forms possible,
1. See the online version of Rhetoric at http://www.public.iastate.edu/∼honeyl/

Rhetoric/index.html, based on the translation of the classical scholar W. Rhys Roberts,
and made available electronically by Lee Honeycutt.
Hyperbole in business and economics lectures 203
e.g., You never listen to me. In a study of the language used by participants
engaged in various types of conversational activities, Pomerantz (1986) ob-
served that extreme case formulations were used mainly when speakers had a
strong interest in legitimizing their claims and discouraging others from contra-
dicting them, particularly when engaging in complaining, accusing, justifying
and defending. Norrick (2004:1728) prefers to make a distinction between hy-
perbole and extreme case formulations, where the former generally refers to
“any extravagant statement”, while the latter is reserved for those statements
that lie at the farthest end of a given scale of reality. Indeed, in his view,
extreme case formulations constitute a sub-category of hyperbole. Moreover,
based on an analysis of data extracted from three corpora (the Saarbrücken
Corpus of Spoken English, the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American
English and the London Lund Corpus), Norrick (2004) found that hyperbole
and extreme case formulations are used in different ways. For example, ex-
treme case formulations are typical of proverbs that often have an apodictic
nature, e.g., Money is the root of all evil, while hyperbolic expressions are as-
sociated with proverbial phrases and idioms, e.g., older than Methuselah, flat
as a pancake.2 In addition, Norrick (2004) suggests that extreme case formu-
lations and hyperbole are not perceived in the same way and thus generate
different types of responses on the part of interlocutors. While obviously false
extreme case formulations can be freely contradicted in subsequent exchanges,
non-extreme hyperboles are normally only downscaled when their validity is
challenged.
Some research in the area of figurative language has highlighted the relation-
ship between hyperbole and irony. According to Gibbs (1994), the two tropes
overlap to a certain extent because neither is construed as a representation of
truth. In a later study, he further argues that hyperbole is only one form of
irony, which also includes jocularity, sarcasm, rhetorical questions and under-
statement (Gibbs 2000). Kreuz and Roberts (1995) suggest that hyperbole and
irony can converge, for instance when intensifying adverbs are combined with
upscaled positive adjectives to comment on a negative situation, e.g., This is
absolutely fantastic!. In experimental research, these authors found that hyper-
bole and irony tended to co-occur in situations involving emphasis and humour3
2. According to Adams (1949), proverbs can be distinguished from proverbial phrases

in that the former have a fixed form, while the latter may vary to fit the grammatical
context (e.g., she was the apple of his eye vs. you are the apple of my eye)
3. With particular reference to humour, Bergen and Binsted (2004) describe hyperbole
as a form a scalar humour, i.e., a cognitive mechanism based on the manipulation of
a conceptual scale.
(Roberts and Kreuz, 1994). Although hyperbole and irony both generate a con-
trast between what is affirmed and what is real, it is worth noting that they do
so in different ways. While hyperbole encodes a “contrast of magnitude”, e.g.,
a strongly negative evaluation, irony encodes a “contrast of kind”, e.g., a neg-
ative evaluation expressed by positive lexis (Colston and O’Brien 2000: 179).
Thus, during analytical procedures, it seems important to distinguish hyperbole
as a trope in its own right, while also recognizing its potential to overlap with
irony.
There has been less work on the interactional dimension of hyperbole within
specific discourse domains. This type of research can provide interesting insights
into how hyperbolic usage may be influenced by the shared experiences and goals
of certain discourse communities. In an analysis of hyperbole in promotional
book blurbs, Cacchiani (2007: 12) used corpus linguistics methods to identify
lexical resources of “hyperbolic appreciation”, e.g., screamingly funny used
by writers to intensify their judgements. In the area of academic discourse,
Olhrogge and Tsang (2004) also used corpus techniques to investigate hyperbole
in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (micase) (Simpson et
al. 2002)4 , with special attention to three different forms: overgeneralization,
e.g. everybody, no one, numerical exaggeration, e.g. thousands, gazillions, and
extreme extent, e.g., I’m dying of thirst. These types of hyperbolic expressions
were found in the data, although not in particularly high frequencies. The authors
suggest that the orientation towards precision and accuracy of some disciplines,
e.g., mathematics, sciences, may result in more literal uses of the items that they
investigated. Following in this direction, the objective of this study is to shed
light on disciplinary influences in the use of hyperbole in academic lectures
from the fields of business and economics. More specifically, by contrastively
analyzing two small corpora of business and economics lectures, I aim to answer
the following research questions:
1. What types of hyperbole occur in the speech of business and economics
lecturers and to what extent?
2. Is hyperbole used differently by business and economics lecturers?
3. What are the functions of hyperbole within these pedagogical settings?
The decision to focus on these related yet distinct disciplines was twofold. First
of all, business and economics courses lie at the core of all business-related de-
grees, one of the most popular curricular choices of university students world-
4. The micase corpus contains 1.8 million words of speech varieties that typically
occur on a university campus, (e.g., lectures, student presentations, advising sessions,
dissertation defences).
wide (Crawford Camiciottoli 2007). Therefore, a better understanding of how

hyperbole is used by business and economics academics can be applied to-
wards developing more effective lecture comprehension courses for non-native
speakers; in fact understanding content lectures in English continues to be prob-
lematic for international students (Crawford Camiciottoli 2010; Mulligan and
Kirkpatrick 2000). In addition, from a disciplinary perspective, business and
economics lectures are particularly interesting candidates for analysis. Busi-
ness lectures typically focus on solving problems in real-world business con-
texts, while economics lectures tend to be more theoretical (MacFarlane 1997).
Thus, understanding the role of hyperbole can provide additional disciplinary
insights and possibly reveal new trends in the teaching of these subjects.
In the next section, in order to better situate the upcoming contrastive anal-
ysis, I provide additional background on business and economics as two dis-
ciplines that share common ground, but also present unique epistemological
orientations.
2. The disciplinary profiles of business and economics
Business courses aim to teach students the fundamentals of business theory,

processes and practices that prepare them to work in a business organization or
business-related field. According to MacFarlane (1997), the objectives of busi-
ness education are both intrinsic, about business, and extrinsic, for business.
Intrinsic objectives focus on helping students understand the impact of business
on society and how to critically evaluate this knowledge. These objectives can
be seen in business courses that deal with topics such as business ethics, interna-
tional trade and business law. Extrinsic objectives are concerned with providing
students with the knowledge and skills needed to make decisions and solve prob-
lems in the real world of business. This orientation is evident in courses such as
accounting, business communication, human resource management, marketing
and finance. In terms of how business courses are taught, the well-consolidated
use of case studies (Jackson 2005; Jaques 2009) is further testimony to their
practice-oriented approach.
Economics courses instead take a broader perspective by teaching students
about economic phenomena and how economic agents interact. Economics is
grounded in the scientific method which entails observing economic trends
and performing analyses by means of mathematical models in order to ad-
vance theories (Samuelson and Nordhaus 2001). Economics traditionally has
two main subfields: macroeconomics that studies entire economic systems, and
microeconomics that looks at how individual entities, such as markets, firms and
households behave within an economic system. Other more specialized areas

of study include labour economics, developmental economics, political econ-
omy and econometrics. Although economic analyses are used to explain existing
economic phenomena, the overall approach is more theoretical than practical.
Despite these different orientations, business and economics courses con-
verge to form the foundation of business studies degree programmes. In English-
medium universities, these degrees are offered at both graduate and post-
graduate levels and are referred to in various ways: ba/ma in Business Stud-
ies, bs in Business, Bachelor/Master of Business Administration, in addition
more specialized degrees, e.g. Bachelor/Master of Business Communication,
International Business, Business Economics or Commercial Law. The link be-
tween business and economics is also seen in the disciplinary backgrounds of
the faculty members who teach in business studies programmes. According to
MacFarlane (1998), many received their formal education in economics and
have actually ‘reinvented’ themselves in order to teach more practice-oriented
business courses, such as management and marketing. However, given the grow-
ing interest among students in pursuing business studies degrees, it stands to
reason that a younger generation of specifically-trained business academics will
soon dominate the field.
3. Methodology
3.1. The corpora

To investigate the use of hyperbole in business vs. economics lectures, two small
corpora were collected. The Business Lecture Corpus, hereinafter blc, is based
on the transcripts of six lectures, 56,312 tokens, that deal with business topics
on a general level, but also in specific contexts. The Economics Lecture Corpus,
hereinafter elc, contains the transcripts of six lectures, 51,278 tokens, that fo-
cus on various topics of economics, including both general principles, as well as
applications of economic theory and analyses of economic trends. The twelve
lectures were procured from various sources. Three lectures were recorded dur-
ing a guest lecture series called the European Business Module (EBM) that
took place at the University of Florence. They were subsequently transcribed by
myself according to simplified conversation analysis transcription conventions.
Two lectures were recorded at the University of Iowa and North Central State
College (Ohio) and sent to me in CD format for transcription. Two lectures were
recorded at New York University and had been collected for a research project,
but never used. The transcripts were courteously provided by a colleague. Two
lectures were retrieved from the micase corpus, see footnote 3, and three from
the British Academic Spoken English corpus (base) which contains 160 lec-
tures and 39 seminars from a wide range of academic subjects.5 Both corpora
were designed to reflect the type of business and economics lectures found in to-
day’s universities, including undergraduate and post graduate levels, large, > 40
and small < 40 class sizes, guest lectures and ongoing classroom lectures. The
lectures were all delivered by native speakers of British or American English,
two females and ten males. They were largely monologic in nature, although
most included sporadic episodes of lecturer-student interaction in the form of
questions or comments. Table 1 provides an overview of the two corpora.
Table 1. Main features of the blc and the elc.
blc Corpus: Lecture/topic Source Level Class Size

bl1/Small and medium-sized enterprises in the ebm ug Small
UK
bl2/Business strategies in the UK ebm ug Small
bl3/Industrial Organization Ohio ug Large
bl4/Introduction to the international business en- base pg Large
vironment
bl5/International marketing relationships base ug Large
bl6/Pricing base ug Large
elc Corpus: Lecture/topic Source Level Class Size
el1/The Japanese Economy ebm pg Small
el2/ Labour Economics micase ug Small
el3/Macroeconomics micase pg Large
el4/Economic Principles New York ug Large
el5/Ethics and Economics New York ug Large
el6/Microeconomics Iowa ug Large
ug = Undergraduate / pg = Postgraduate
3.2. The analytical procedure

As a pragmatic device, hyperbole can be encoded by a wide range of lexico-
grammatical forms (Cano Mora 2009). However, taking cues from previous
5. The base corpus (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/celte/research/base/) was de-

veloped at the Universities of Warwick and Reading under the directorship of Hilary
Nesi (Warwick) and Paul Thompson (Reading). Corpus development was assisted
by funding from the Universities of Warwick and Reading, baleap, euralex, the
British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
work (Kreuz and Roberts 1995; McCarthy and Carter 2004; Ohlrogge and Tsang
2004), I restricted the analysis to three common types of hyperbole:
– extreme adjectives and adverbs, e.g., disastrous, astonishing, absolutely,
never;
– overgeneralization, e.g., no one, everybody;
– numerical exaggeration, e.g., millions, tonnes, dozens.
Because these lexical items include open-class categories, to perform exhaustive
analyses it was necessary to process the two corpora with grammatical tagging
software, i.e., the claws tagger.6 This procedure automatically attaches a tag to
each lexical unit that encodes its part of speech. It is one of the most basic forms
of corpus annotation (Leech 1997), and is now a standard feature of widely-
used large English language corpora, e.g., Bank of English, British National
Corpus. Although grammatical tagging is not often applied to small and self-
collected corpora, it is nonetheless the only feasible methodology when one
aims to analyze entire word classes, such as adjectives and adverbs, rather than
a pre-determined set of lemmas.
The two tagged versions of the blc and the elc were then processed with
WordSmithTools (Scott 2004) to generate concordance lines based on searches of
specific tags: jj/general adjectives, rr/general adverbs, pn/indefinite pronouns
and nno2/plural numeral nouns. This enabled all instances of each word class
to be automatically retrieved. The concordance output was then submitted to
a series of resorting and editing phases in order to distinguish only the hyper-
bolic uses of retrieved items and to identify patterns of interest. The resulting
core sets of hyperbolic expressions where then interpreted qualitatively within
the surrounding co-text to gain insights into their interpersonal and pragmatic
functions.
4. Results and discussion
4.1. Extreme adjectives and adverbs

Searches based on the general adjective tag jj retrieved 2,931 occurrences in the
blc and 2,708 occurrences in the elc, whereas the searches based on the general
adverb tag rr retrieved 2,138 occurrences in the blc and 2,171 occurrences in
6. The claws (Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-Tagging System) was devel-

oped at ucrel (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) of
Lancaster University. The software uses a tagset articulated into 137 word class tags
and, according to its developers, has an accuracy rate of 95–96%.
the elc 44. While these preliminary totals were certainly daunting, fortunately
WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004) provides a very efficient re-sorting function to
group items alphabetically. In this way, entire sections of large numbers of un-
wanted non-hyperbolic items, e.g., other, certain, national, only, can be quickly
removed from the data. Figure 1 illustrates a sample of resorted concordances
of the general adjective tag jj from the blc, where the hyperbolic adjective stun-
ning emerges from the other adjectives strong, evaluative, but non-hyperbolic,
and structural, descriptive.
N Concordance
2.563 ’s VBZ a AT1 few DA2 strong JJ firms NN2 who PNQS dopera- JJ , ,
2.564 have VHI a AT1 few DA2 strong JJ players NN2 in II virtually RR all DB
2.565 prices NN2 were VBDR strong JJ today RT and CC interest NN1
2.566 it PPH1 ’s VBZ very RG strong JJ and CC it PPH1 ’s VBZ all DB of IO
2.567 in RP had VHD very RG strong JJ links NN2 to II their APPGE
2.568 with IW a AT1 few DA2 strong JJ players NN2 in II has VHZ
2.569 xx MC ) ) Yes UH And CC structural JJ changes NN2 caused VVN by II
2.570 era NN1 of IO great JJ structural JJ change NN1 in II the AT UK NP1
2.571 the AT absolutely RR stunning JJ arrogance NN1 for IF someone PN1
2.572 you PPY will VM give VVI stunning JJ presentations NN2 completely RR
2.573 is VBZ was VBDZ so RG stunning JJ when CS that DD1 happened VVD
2.574 that DD1 time NNT1 the AT stunning JJ the AT absolutely RR stunning JJ
Figure 1. Sample of resorted concordances of the general adjective tag jj in blc.
In the initial phase of editing, distinguishing hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs

from non-hyperbolic items was relatively straightforward. However, once the
latter had been removed, it was necessary to determine whether the remaining
items went beyond mere evaluation (cf. Martin and White 2005) to actually en-
code hyperbolic meanings. This required extensive manual analysis of the data.
For example, there were instances of items such as irritating and profoundly that
clearly encoded evaluative meanings, but did not appear to be exaggerated or
non-literal. While recognizing an inevitable degree of subjectivity in this cate-
gorization, following criteria established by McCarthy and Carter (2004), I con-
sidered adjectives and adverbs to be hyperbolic when they were used to describe
entities in extreme ways, were counterfactual but not intentionally deceptive, or
were in some way at odds with the reality of the context. In example (1)7 totally
does not seem hyperbolic since it is plausible that the authors of the paper actu-
ally did not address the issue of partial retirement. On the other hand, in example
7. In all the examples, tags have been removed and standard punctuation has been
inserted to facilitate reading.
(2) totally does appear to be exaggerated as the Japanese government’s gdp fig-
ures may contain errors, but it is highly unlikely that they would be completely
inaccurate. In example (3), always can be interpreted as counterfactual, also
because it is immediately contradicted in the next utterance by just about. In
example (4), the adjective stinky is used in an unexpected context (tax reporting)
which intensifies its effect. In addition, it is hedged by kinda which seems to
function somewhat paradoxically as an attention-focusing device, corroborat-
ing work by Poos and Simpson (2002:16) who found a similar signalling use of
hedges before “particularly sophisticated or jargon words” in the micase corpus.
(1) If you read the paper quickly, you might not notice that the issue of partial
retirement was totally dodged. (elc/2)
(2) The way the Japanese government has collected gdp figures has been so
poor [. . . ] So the way they’ve been collecting figures has been totally
inaccurate. (elc/1)
(3) Why do some industries consistently return better profits [. . . ] than other
industries [. . . ] why is tanning always so bloody awful on any criteria.
Leather goods just about hits the bottom of just about every index you
know. (blc/4)
(4) If you’re the president of the company and then you file your taxes, you
get taxed again which is kinda stinky. (blc/3)
As to be expected, there were some borderline cases where hyperbolic vs. non-
hyperbolic usage was not at all clear-cut. In example (5), the lecturer used the
adjective huge to describe a decline in costs. In reality, whether this assessment
is largely accurate or exaggerated cannot be determined from the text alone. This
would actually seem to be an instance of “institutionalized scientific hyperbole”
(McCarthy and Carter 2004: 172) where extreme but vague descriptors are used
to refer to very large quantities. I opted to classify such cases as hyperbolic since
the lexical choice veers towards an extreme assessment, i.e., the speaker chose
huge rather than a less extreme but equally accurate quantifier such as large or
significant.
(5) I looked at the process of inflation and import costs in Britain have been
falling at something like four percent over the five or six years from 1995 to
now. So there’s been a huge decline in the costs of importers’ raw materials.
(blc/2)
After the above-described editing procedures were completed, a list of hyperbolic
adjectives and adverbs was compiled for each corpus. Tables 2 and 3 report the
different forms and frequencies, in parentheses, found in the blc and the elc,
respectively.
Table 2. Hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs in the blc.
Adjectives (N) Adverbs (N)

aggressive (1), amazed (2), amazing absolutely (3), abysmally (2), always
(1), awful (2), biggy (1), bizarre (1), (2), completely (7), dramatically (1),
crazy (3), desperate (2), dramatic (1), enormously (1), horrendously (1), hor-
enormous (3), hot (1), huge (10), im- ribly (1), incredibly (3), massively (1),
possible (1), incestuous (1), lavish (1), never (1), seamlessly (1), terribly (2),
lousy (3), massive (2), mega (2), nasty totally (3)
(2), noxious (1), scary (1), seminal (1)
stinky (1), stunning (3), superb (3),
terrible (1), unthinkable (1), utter (2),
vulgar (1), wonderful (1)
Total (57) Total (29)
Table 3. Hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs in the elc.
Adjectives (N) Adverbs (N)

astonishing (1), astounding (1), absolutely (1), always (2), brutally
awful (2), bizarre (1), crazy (2), de- (1), depressingly (1), desperately
pressing (2), dismal (1), enormous (1), dramatically (1), fabulously (1),
(2), giant (2), huge (5), infinite (1), recklessly (1), strikingly (1), totally
massive (1), nasty (2), no-brainer (3), unbelievably (1)
(1), painful (2), terrible (2), tremen-
dous (1), ugly (1), vast (2), whop-
ping (1)
Total (33) Total (14)
As can be seen from the two tables, hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs are not
particularly frequent in either corpora, in line with previous work by Ohlrogge
and Tsang (2004) on spoken academic discourse. Hyperbolic adjectives and ad-
verbs were somewhat more frequent in the blc, 86 items or 15.2 occurrences
per 10,000 words, in comparison with the elc, 47 items or 9.1 occurrences per
10,000 words. In addition, in the blc there was a slightly wider variety of dif-
ferent adjective and adverb types than in the elc, even if there was considerable
overlapping between the two corpora, e.g., awful, bizarre, absolutely, totally,
massive, enormous. Only the item huge had more than three occurrences across
both corpora and was also used by several different lecturers, while the other
items appeared much more sporadically, i.e., 1 to 3 occurrences, and were often
used exclusively by the same lecturer, e.g. lousy, nasty, abysmally, thus pointing
to the influence of individual propensities. Evidence of personal preferences is

also seen in the dispersion plots of all hyperbolic adjectives in the blc (Fig.2)
and the elc (Fig.3). In the six plots of the blc, two lectures contained relatively
high frequencies compared with the other four. Similarly, in the five plots of the
elc, one lecture contained only two instances, while another contained none at
all since a plot was not even generated.
Figure 2. Dispersion plot of hyperbolic adjectives in the blc.
Figure 3. Dispersion plot of hyperbolic adjectives in the elc.
The different hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs used across the blc and the
elc can be grouped into two main types: (1) exaggeration of size, frequency
or extent and (2) extreme evaluations, as illustrated in examples 6–9. In exam-
ple (6) the adjective giant exaggerates the size of companies, which gives more
rhetorical strength to the lecturer’s claim. In example (7) the lecturer uses always
to overstate frequency in a mildly self-deprecating way, thus apparently poking
fun at himself. In example (8), horribly expresses an extreme negative assess-
ment of a situation. The lists in tables 2 and 3 show that negatively-charged
items outnumber positively-charged ones across both corpora. Other studies
have found a similar trend. Cano Mora (2009) found that negative hyperbolic
items were more frequent than positive ones in her study of conversation ex-
tracted from the bnc. In a comparative analysis of business studies lectures vs.
lectures from other disciplinary areas, in the former there were more negative
than positive affect markers (Crawford Camiciottoli 2007), likely influenced
by the epistemological orientation towards critical analysis of economic phe-
nomena and problem-solving in business contexts. In example (9), the extreme
adverb strikingly is used to indirectly criticize the author of a paper. Although

less strong, this is similar to what Colston and O’Brien (2000: 182) refer to as
the pragmatic function of condemnation. Again, we find the hyperbolic item
preceded by the hedge kind of, which seems to call greater attention to it. It
could be that the lecturer engaged in this type of criticism as a sort of thought-
provoking exercise for students to encourage them to think critically for them-
selves.
(6) What policy did was to target certain sectors, build up companies that
became bigger and bigger, giant successful firms that became the centre
of strategic decision making. (elc/1)
(7) I apologize for the quality of these slides I did them myself and that’s
always the wrong thing to do. (blc/2)
(8) You’ve got a situation where it really went horribly wrong in terms of how
people reacted in that environment. (blc/4)
(9) What’s kind of strikingly missing from the paper is, age or time as an
independent determiner of retirement. (elc/2)
Some items reflected a convergence of hyperbole and irony (Kreuz and Roberts
1995). In example (10), when describing corporations, the lecturer refers to their
obligation to pay taxes as a wonderful right. In example (11), the lecturer uses
the adverb incredibly to upscale positive quality, but then immediately proceeds
to undermine it in reality. In both cases, the lecturers seem to be aiming for a
humorous effect.
(10) Corporations can own property [. . . ] and also have the wonderful right of
paying taxes. (blc/3)
(11) Did you hear the example last term of Kevlar DuPont? Kevlar was this
incredibly clever fabric that was going to follow on from Nylon [. . . ] and
they invented it but they didn’t have any idea what they were going to do
with it and nobody in the market could actually find an application for
Kevlar. (blc/6)
Some lecturers amplified their hyperbolic language by combining intensifying
adverbs, and extreme adjectives and other supporting devices (McCarthy and
Carter 2004). For example, one lecturer used the expressions absolutely enor-
mous, absolutely stunning, and terribly incestuous, and huge great (blc/4).
Complex syntactic structures surrounding a hyperbolic lexical item were also
found: bigger and bigger giant successful firms (elc/1), bigger, a lot bigger,
massively much bigger (blc/5). Such combinations seem particularly persua-
sive in nature, in an effort not only to communicate extreme assessments, but
also to drive home particular points to listeners.
Finally, four instances of hyperbole were found in rather conventional fixed

expressions and could thus be considered dead tropes (McCarthy and Carter
2004), whose exaggerated or non-literal meanings likely go unnoticed: hot off
the press (blc/3), growing like crazy (blc/3), utter load of bullocks (blc/4), a
no-brainer (elc/2).
4.2. Overgeneralization
The search based on the indefinite pronoun tag pn produced a total 60 lex-
ical items the blc vs. 38 in the elc, comprising the forms nobody, no one,
nothing, none, everybody, everyone, and everything. As was the case for the
adjectives and adverbs analyzed in the previous section, in both corpora the oc-
currences required in-depth qualitative analysis to distinguish hyperbolic from
non-hyperbolic meanings. For instance, in example (12), everybody is used in
a literal sense to check the comprehension of all participating students. Simi-
larly, in example (13), everything was not counted as hyperbolic because it can
be interpreted as referring to all of the financial information that companies
must disclose. In contrast, in example (14), everyone is a clear exaggeration,
apparently used to reinforce the lecturer’s assessment of a large numbers of com-
panies that would be interested in the business transaction described. Moreover,
embedding everyone in the figurative expression beating at your door further
heightens its hyperbolic effect.
(12) Everybody’s happy so far? Following okay? Yeah? (elc/1)
(13) There’s been a matter of requiring financial reports on a quarterly basis
along with an annual report. That all came out with government regulations
to keep everything public. (blc/3)
(14) If you have got an attractive division that you could do a buy-out or a
buy-in [. . . ] There’ll be Schroders, there’ll be Morgan Grenfell, there’ll be
Nomura [. . . ] everyone will be beating on your door. (blc/4)
In the elc, some indefinite pronouns occurred in episodes of hypothetical rea-
soning and model-building (15). We know from previous research that hypothet-
icality is key to the construction of knowledge in the field of economics and is
a common feature of economics textbooks (Tadros 1994; Bondi 1999). In these
cases, indefinite pronouns do not describe realities, but neither do they convey
a sense of exaggeration for affective or evaluative purposes. Thus, I opted not
to count these occurrences as hyperbolic.
(15) So this A B is exactly what we’re talking about [. . . ] before we had no
unemployment because we had the equilibrium wage rate that everyone
that was looking for a job had a job. (elc/4)
After removing all non-hyperbolic uses of indefinite pronouns from the con-
cordance output, the remaining hyperbolic uses were tallied and reported in
Table 4.
Table 4. Hyperbolic uses of indefinite pronouns in blc vs. elc.
Indefinite pronoun blc elc

Everybody 8 2
Everyone 4 –
Everything 3 4
Nobody 7 1
No one 3 2
Nothing 1 1
Total 26 10
From the table, it is evident that hyberbolic uses of indefinite pronouns are rela-
tively infrequent in both the blc and the elc, with only 26 and 10 occurrences,
respectively. Moreover, these items did not occur in the speech of all the lec-
turers. In the blc, only three lecturers used indefinite pronouns hyperbolically,
while in the elc only four did so. Thus, this type of hyperbole would seem to
be particularly influenced by individual proclivities.
When comparing the two types of hyperbole analyzed thus far, an interesting
pattern emerged in the blc. The same two lectures that contained the most
hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs also had the higher frequencies of hyperbolic
indefinite pronouns (i.e., blc/3 and blc/4). In fact, these two lecturers used
hyperbolic language in a way that resembles everyday conversation (McCarthy
and Carter 2004), which renders their speech quite rhetorical and informal, as
illustrated in examples (16) and (17). Example (17) is particularly interesting as it
shows how hyperbole was exploited to insert a bit of humour. This was evidently
successful judging from the audience’s response signalled in the transcript with
[laughter].
(16) So the worst that could possibly happen is that if you invested ten thousand
dollars and became a limited partner and they turn out to be, you know,
they did something terrible and the government comes and everyone sues
them and stuff like that, all you’re gonna be out is your ten grand. (blc/3)
(17) I changed career at forty-two and became a youth in a business school which
is a seminal experience for me at least, starting off you know knowing
nothing at forty-two, like saying who’s Porter and everyone sort of crosses
themselves [laughter]. (blc/4)
In addition to reflecting individual teaching styles, the more pronounced use of

hyperbole on the part of the two blc lecturers could also be favoured by the
real-world context of the lectures, which may offer more possibilities to opine
in exaggerated ways. In fact, no similar patterning was found in the elc. The
relatively few instances of hyperbolic indefinite pronouns could not be matched
to parallel uses of hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps the theory-oriented
and model-driven content of economics lectures provides less opportunity for
hyperbolic assessments.
4.3. Numerical exaggeration

The search based on the plural numeral noun tag nno2 retrieved very few oc-
currences in both corpora: 9 in the blc vs. 4 in the elc, distributed among the
lexical items hundreds, thousands, billion, trillions and dozens. Careful exami-
nation of these items in the surrounding co-text revealed that several had literal
meanings (e.g., the eighteen hundreds). In some cases, distinguishing between
hyperbolic and non-hyperbolic meanings proved to be somewhat problematic.
In examples (18) and (19), the lecturers clearly want to emphasize very large
quantities, also by means of reduplication. Yet it cannot be ruled out that these
numerical values actually correspond to reality in these contexts. Thus, such
occurrences were not counted as hyperbolic. In the end, only one occurrence in
the blc appeared to be hyperbolic (example 20), as it seems highly improbable
that there would be hundreds of definitions of strategy.
(18) Why have we only got four or five major supermarkets, three or four major
supermarkets, but why have we got thousands and thousands of corner
shops. (blc/4)
(19) So over many years there was the creation of big trade surpluses, lopsided,
one sided trade surpluses We’re talking billions of yen every year, trillions
of yen in surpluses. (elc/1)
(20) Grant says we’re looking at that link between the environment and the firm.
That link in Grant’s terms is what he calls strategy. Now there’s hundreds of
definitions, but what Charles said was essentially what people don’t look
at is the nature of the prevailing environment outside of the organization.
(blc/4)
The fact that only one occurrence of plural numeral nouns could be interpreted as
hyperbolic indicates that numerical exaggeration is not common in business and
economics lectures. This finding seems somewhat surprising, given the strong
overall numerical slant of the two disciplines. However, in these business and
economics lectures plural numeral nouns were apparently associated mainly
with concrete and plausible meanings. In their analysis of numerical exagger-

ation in the micase corpus, Ohlrogge and Tsang (2004) also found such items
to be fairly rare. This was attributed to the precise scientific nature of some of
the disciplinary fields represented in the data, which would also be applicable
to business and economics.
Another reason for the lack of numerical exaggeration could be linked to the
largely monologic nature of the lectures, which could restrain this type of us-
age. In fact, plural numeral nouns are instead often hyperbole-prone in dialogic
everyday conversation (McCarthy and Carter 2004) and strongly linked to its in-
teractional nature. In sum, even if spoken academic discourse in general (Swales
2004) and monologic lectures in particular (Crawford Camiciottoli 2007) share
many features with everyday conversation (e.g. dysfluencies, vagueness, idioms,
lexical and syntactic informality), numerical exaggeration does not appear to
be one of them.
5. Conclusions
On a general level, this study’s focus on hyperbole has contributed to redressing

the imbalance of research on figurative language which has tended to privilege
other tropes, particularly metaphor and irony (Cano Mora 2005). On a more
specific level, the findings of the comparative analysis of hyperbolic language
in business vs. economics lectures have shed some light on the three research
questions that were originally posed.
With reference to the first question, both the business and the economics
lectures contain extreme hyperbolic adjectives/adverbs and indefinite pronouns
used to overgeneralize, even if neither forms appear in high frequencies. Yet I
would argue that in this communicative context the issue of frequency is not
particularly relevant. What seems more important is that all of the business and
economics academics exploited hyperbole (some more, some less) in message-
oriented and monologic discourse apparently to achieve pedagogical aims. Since
hyperbole is more typically associated with relations-oriented and dialogic ev-
eryday conversation (McCarthy and Carter 2004), its presence in these lectures
supports the notion that lectures are becoming more interactional and infor-
mal (Miller 2002), and that this trend is transversal across disciplines, even
empirically-oriented ones. However, one form of hyperbole, i.e., numerical ex-
aggeration, was largely missing in the business and economics lectures, only 1
instance, indicating that numerical precision nonetheless remains characteristic
of these disciplines.
The second research question addressed differences between the use of hy-
perbole in business vs. economics lectures. Overall, no striking differences were
found, even if the business lectures contained somewhat more hyperbole and a
wider variety of forms. In addition, two of the business lectures presented rel-
atively high concentrations of hyperbolic language, which could be influenced
by the real-world orientation of business education. On the other hand, in the
economics lectures, the use of hypothetical reasoning and mathematical models
may have contributed to less hyperbolic language. However, differences linked
to the individual personalities and lecturing styles of the twelve speakers cannot
be ruled out. For more conclusive results on this front, it would be necessary to
analyze the speech of many more business and economics lecturers.8
The third research question dealt with the functions of hyperbole in the busi-
ness and the economics lectures. On a general level, the use of hyperbole by the
participants of this study can be interpreted as broadly rhetorical. According to
McCloskey (1985), economics relies not only on empirical methods, but also on
rhetorical devices, such as metaphor and analogy, to make knowledge claims.
Similarly, the business and economics lecturers used hyperbole rhetorically to
strengthen their opinions in an effort to persuade their listeners. In addition,
follow-up qualitative analysis of hyperbole within the context of usage revealed
some more specific interpersonal and pragmatic functions, i.e., affect, humour,
irony, and criticism, that appeared to be closely linked to the pedagogic setting.
For example, extreme adjectives and adverbs were used to emphasize and evalu-
ate certain qualities and thus clarify them beyond doubt to students. Hyperbolic
expressions also surfaced in episodes of humour and irony which seemed to
aim at raising the interest level and livening up the lecture. Some lecturers used
hyperbole in a critical sense, perhaps attempting to stimulate students to think
critically in a similar way.
Due to the limited number of speakers involved in this study, all the findings
need to be interpreted with caution. While they are not broadly generalizable,
they are nonetheless valuable to suggest potential patterns of hyperbole in busi-
ness and economics lectures that could be further investigated, also using dif-
ferent methodological approaches. For example, an in-depth case study of the
speech of one business lecturer vs. one economics lecturer that also incorporates
participant feedback gleaned from interviews could provide interesting cognitive
8. This would require accessing, recording and transcribing large numbers of business
and economics lectures. Clearly, the more specialized spoken discourse is, the less
feasible it is for individual researchers to collect large amounts of it. Hopefully, the
new trend of online audio files of lectures (e.g., Itunes University, Open Courseware)
may eventually lead to a parallel production of lecture transcripts that can be readily
accessed for both instructional and research purposes.
insights into the use of hyperbole in these teaching contexts. Another variable
linked to the use of hyperbole in speech that could be explored is prosody. Kreuz
and Roberts (1995) suggest that some prosodic features, i.e., slower speech rate,
greater stress and nasalization, may be linked to irony and hyperbole. Although
beyond the purview of this study, it would have been interesting to analyze the
prosodic features of the hyperbolic language found in the business and economic
lectures in the corresponding audio files.
To conclude, this study has enhanced our understanding of how hyperbole
is used in classroom discourse in general, but more importantly, in business
and economics lectures which play a crucial role in business studies curricula
worldwide. It is hoped that the findings will find fruitful application in the devel-
opment of more authentic, and therefore more effective, lecture comprehension
materials to help international students improve their listening skills in business
and economics courses.
References
Adams, Owen S.
1949 Proverbial phrases from California. Western Folklore, 8(2): 95–116.
Arac, Jonothan
1979 Rhetoric and realism in nineteenth-century fiction: Hyperbole in The
Mill on the Floss. ELH 46(4): 673–692.
Bergen, Benjamin and Kim Binsted
2004 The cognitive linguistics of scalar humor. In Language, Culture, and
Mind, Michael Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), 79–92. Stanford,
CA: CSLI.
Bondi, Marina
1999 English across Genres: Language Variation in the Discourse of Eco-
nomics. Modena: Il Fiorino.
Cacchiani, Silvia
2007 From narratives to intensification and hyperbole: promotional uses of
book blurbs. Paper n. 79. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics
Conference. CL 2007, Matthew Davies, Paul Rayson, Susan Hunston
and Pernilla Danielsson (eds.). Retrieved March 1, 2010 at
http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/corplingproceedings07/.
Cano Mora, Laura
2005 On the verge of impossibility: A conversational and discourse ap-
proach to hyperbole in interaction. In Cognitive and Discourse Ap-
proaches to Metaphor and Metonym, Jose Luis Otal Campo, Ignasi
Navarro i Ferrando and Begoña Bellés Fortuño (eds.), 175–185.
Castelló de la Plana, Spain: Publicaciones de la Universitat Jaume I.
Cano Mora, Laura

2009 All or nothing: A semantic analysis of hyperbole. Revista de Lingüı́sti-
ca y Lenguas Aplicadas. 4: 25–35.
Colston, Herbert L. and Shauna B. Keller
1998 You’ll never believe this: Irony and hyperbole in expressing surprise.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 27(4): 499–513.
Colston, Herbert L. and Jennifer O’Brien
2000 Contrast of kind versus contrast of magnitude: The pragmatic accom-
plishments of irony and hyperbole. Discourse Processes 30(2): 179–
199.
2010 Meeting the challenges of European student mobility: Preparing Ital-
ian Erasmus students for business lectures in English. English for
Specific Purposes 28(4): 268–280.
2007 The Language of Business Studies Lectures: A Corpus-assisted Anal-
ysis. Amsterdam/London: John Benjamins.
Gibbels, Elisabeth
2005 Chaos, hyperbole, and repetition: style as political and social critique.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, www.post-scriptum.org
(n. 5, 2005), paragraph 12. Retrieved March 3, 2010 from
http://www.post-scriptum.org/flash/docs2/art 2005 05 002.pdf.
Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr.
1994 The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understand-
ing. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr.
2000 Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol 15 (1&2): 5–27.
Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr., Darin L. Buchalter, Jessica F. Moise and William T. Farrar IV
1993 Literal meaning and figurative language. Discourse Processes 16 (4):
387–403.
Jackson, Jane
2005 An inter-university, cross-disciplinary analysis of business education:
Perception of business faculty in Hong Kong. English for Specific
Purposes 24 (3): 293–306.
Jaques, Tony
2009 The case for case studies: Optimising the use of communication cases.
PRism 6 (1): http://praxis.massey.ac.nz/prism on-line journ.html.
Kreuz, Roger J. and Richard M. Roberts
1995 Two cues for verbal irony: Hyperbole and the ironic tone of voice.
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10 (1): 21–31.
Leech, Geoffrey
1997 Introducing corpus annotation. In Corpus Annotation: Linguistic In-
formation from Computer Text Corpora, Roger Garside, Geoffrey
Leech and Anthony McEnery (eds.), 1–17, Longman: London.
Macfarlane, Bruce
1997 In search of an identity: Lecturer perceptions of the Business Studies
first degree. Journal of Vocational Education and Training 49 (1):
5–20.
Macfarlane, Bruce
1998 Business lecturers in higher education: Outsider reputations, insider
values. Paper presented at the International Conference Higher Edu-
cation Close Up, Lancaster University, 6–8. July 1998.
Martin, J.R. and P.R.R. White
2005 The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Houndmills, Bas-
ingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
McCarthy, Michael and Ronald Carter
2004 “There’s millions of them”: hyperbole in everyday conversation. Jour-
nal of Pragmatics 36: 149–184.
McCloskey, Deirdre N.
1985 The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press.
Miller, Lindsay
2002 Towards a model for lecturing in a second language. Journal of English
for Academic Purposes 1 (2): 145–162.
Mulligan, Denise and Andy Kirkpatrick
2000 How much do they understand? Lectures, students and comprehen-
sion. Higher Education Research and Development 19 (3): 311–335.
Norrick, Neal R.
2004 Hyperbole, extreme case formulation. Journal of Pragmatics 36 (9):
1727–1739.
Olhrogge, Aaron and Judy Tsang
2004 “I’m dying to ask you a question”: Hyperbole, corpus linguistics and
academic discourse. Paper presented at the 2nd Annual Hawaii Interna-
tional Conference on Arts and Humanities, January 8–11, Honolulu,
Hawaii.
Pomerantz, Anita
1986 Extreme case formulations: a way of legitimizing claims. Human Stud-
ies 9 (2&3): 219–229.
Poos, Deanna and Rita Simpson
2002 Cross-disciplinary comparisons of hedging: Some findings from the
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. In Using Corpora
to Explore Linguistic Variation, Randi Reppen, Susan M. Fitzmau-
rice and Douglas Biber (eds.), 3–23. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Roberts, Richard M. and Roger J. Kreuz
1994 Why do people use figurative language? Psychological Science 5 (3):
159–163.
Ruiz Sánchez, Antonio

2000 Son of excess: Hyperbole, and the American Adamic tradition. Spring
(the Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society), 9: 73–95.
2001 Macroeconomics. 17th Edition. Boston: Irwin/McGraw Hill.
Scott, Mike
2004 WordSmith Tools. Version 4. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Simpson, Rita C., Sarah L. Briggs, Jeannine Ovens and John M. Swales
2002 The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Ann Arbor, MI:
The Regents of the University of Michigan.
Stanivukovic, Goran V.
2007 “Mounting above the truthe”: On hyperbole in English Renaissance
literature. Forum for Modern Language Study 43(1): 9–33.
Swales, John M.
2004 Evaluation in academic speech: First forays. In Academic Discourse.
New Insights into Evaluation, Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti and
Elena Tognini Bonelli (eds.), 31–53. Bern: Peter Lang.
Tadros, Angele
1994 Predictive categories in expository texts. In Advances in Written Text
Analysis, Malcolm Coulthard (ed.), 69–82. London: Routledge.
Section III
Metaphor in the economy and business in
practice
The perfect storm: An imperfect metaphor
Philip Eubanks
Abstract
The metaphor of “the perfect storm” has emerged as one of the most commonly asserted
explanations for the recent global economic collapse. Despite its relative newness, we
might expect it to operate in the same way as well-established conceptual metaphors.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory tells us that while conventional metaphors vary in the
way they are expressed, they nonetheless operate with conceptual regularity. They have
identifiable entailments; they are constrained by embodied and perceptual limitations;
and they operate as part of coherent metaphor systems. Attimes, perfect storm operates in
roughly that way. For instance, it often works in concert with other economic metaphors
such as Business Is (Nautical) Travel and Economic Conditions Are Weather. Yet, with
striking frequency, it operates differently. It fails to display or even violates the entailments
we might sensibly attribute to it. Indeed, it sometimes violates embodied, perceptual
constraints. In light of this odd behavior, this essay examines (1) whether or not perfect
storm really has the entailments we might reasonably attribute to it and (2) if it does not,
what might account for its seeming to entail so little?
1. Introduction
With the 1997 publication of The Perfect Storm, the bestselling account of a
“nor’easter” that sunk the Andrea Gail off the coast of Nova Scotia and killed
the six fishermen aboard, a new expression entered the English language. Unlike
most phrases that catch on for awhile and quickly pass away, perfect storm seems
to fill a need that is met by no other expression – at least, not by any expression so
pithy. The storm that sunk the Andrea Gail arose from converging weather events
that aligned “perfectly,” meteorologists explained, to create a more destructive
storm than any of the contributing events on their own would have augured.
The phrase is now used to describe virtually any confluence of events that has a
large, usually negative, result.
Perfect storm suits economic disasters well, not least because it is com-
patible with the conceptual metaphors Business Is (Nautical) Travel and Eco-
nomic Conditions Are Weather. Instances of these well-established economic
226 Philip Eubanks
metaphors are easily called to mind. Companies often need to right the ship
or navigate choppy waters or have flagship products. The economy often en-
counters stormy weather or operates in a favorable climate. Moreover, the jour-
neying and weather metaphors readily combine. Touting a positive jobs re-
port, President Obama assures the nation that the “worst of the storm is over”
and that “while we’ve come a long way, we’ve still got a ways to go.” Simi-
larly, the metaphors are combined in the familiar phrase a rising tide lifts all
boats.
Together, Business Is (Nautical) Travel and Economic Conditions Are
Weather also support well-elaborated metaphoric passages. Consider the fol-
lowing extended metaphor from Black Enterprise.
Acts of terrorism. An economy in recession. A turbulent stock market. Waning
consumer confidence. Rising unemployment. If it weren’t for scant inflation and
low interest rates, corporate America would have steered right into the middle
of a perfect storm. Like their white counterparts, America’s most powerful black
executives are navigating their companies and divisions through treacherous
waters nonetheless.
Take Kenneth I. Chenault, the hard-charging CEO of American Express. His
$23 billion financial services giant has been hit by the equivalent of a tsunami. By
mid-year, the company announced 5,000 layoffs and poor second-quarter results
due to the weakened economy and an $826 million write-down of junk bonds in
the investment portfolio of its financial services unit.
Then came another crashing wave in the form of the September 11 terrorist
attacks. (Dingle and Hughes 2002: 86, emphasis added)
Such extended metaphors are easy to find, and it would be easy to extend them
even further. Would it surprise anyone to hear that after the crashing wave of
September 11 hit many businesses that they foundered, sank, hit the rocks, or
ran aground? And why not? They must certainly have faced gale-force winds
and roiling seas as they – and so on. It is no surprise either – not to me – that
perfect storm plays a part in the passage above. It fits.
The staying power and creative potential of the nautical and weather
metaphors is attributable neither to arbitrary convention nor to creative whimsy.
According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), rising tides, favorable cli-
mates, choppy waters, flagship products, and the like are more than just stock
phrases. We would not talk so pervasively and persistently about rising tides and
favorable climates if we did not fundamentally understand economic activity by
means of underlying conceptual metaphors. It is part of our basic conceptual
apparatus to see economic actors as sailing forward through good weather and
bad and to see businesses and economies as rising or sinking. No wonder we
see so many variations, routine and novel.
Conceptual metaphors are often productive, but they are not without limits.
Indeed, they are constrained by bodily experiences and perceptions. It would
make no metaphoric sense, for example, to say that a bankrupt business kept its
head above water. That’s backwards. Keeping your head above water indicates
success or, at least, the avoidance of failure. Furthermore, conceptual metaphors
have entailments – things that are necessarily implied by the metaphor. The
image-schema of Business Is (Nautical) Travel entails a source, a path, and
a goal. The image-schema of Economic Conditions Are Weather entails sunny
days and stormy days. Without these entailments, we would not know how to ex-
tend the combined metaphors in a sensible way. They are what make conceptual
metaphors work.
This essay is concerned with the entailments – or absence of entailments –
of perfect storm and their effect – or lack of effect – on its extendibility. Perfect
storm is at times productive. Yet with striking frequency, it exhibits a failure
to launch (to pick an appropriate phrase). Thus, the questions I examine are
(1) whether or not perfect storm really has the entailments we might reasonably
attribute to it and (2) if it does not, what might account for its seeming to entail so
little? At the same time, this examination of perfect storm will contribute more
generally to our understanding of the nature of entailments and the extendibility
of metaphors.
2. Metaphoric Entailments and Metaphoric Extendibility
Before making specific observations about perfect storm, I want to contemplate

what it might mean for a metaphor to be especially productive and, conversely,
what it might mean for a metaphor to be used only in a limited way. This dis-
cussion focuses on the complex relationship between constraints, motivations,
and creativity.
One of the chief contributions of Conceptual Metaphor Theory is the idea
that even seemingly extravagant literary metaphors are often instantiations of
well-established conceptual metaphors and are constrained in the same ways as
their workaday cousins.
In American English, I can think of no better examples than Robert Frost’s
poems “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken.”
The first is about a man who pauses in the woods for a moment of peace and
concludes, “But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” The
second is about one man’s choices in life and concludes, “Two roads diverged
in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the
difference.” For all of their poignancy, both poems rest on an ordinary projection
228 Philip Eubanks
of the source-path-goal image-schema from the domain of Journey to the domain

of Life. Neither can make sense if we do not understand that a life follows a
pathway from birth to death, that there is a generic similarity between journeying
and living. Frost’s conceptual frame is utterly mundane–no different from clichés
such as life’s journey or the end of the road.
In other words, the poems adhere to the image-schematic entailments of the
metaphor Life Is A Journey. The poems follow what George Lakoff and Mark
Turner have called the invariance hypothesis, a hypothesis that was mentioned
regularly in the 1980s and 1990s (Lakoff 1993; Turner 1992, 1996). The most
consistently asserted element of the hypothesis says simply that the image-
schemas of the target and source will not clash. Instances of Life Is Journey
virtually always exhibit such coherent mappings. Living things move from the
beginning of life (the source), through life and its events (the path), and to the
end (the goal). That seems rather obvious. But incoherencies are imaginable.
An expression that attempts a circular path or an interrupted path would violate
the invariance hypothesis.
Looming nearby the question of coherence is the question of necessity: If a
metaphor must map an image-schema coherently, does that mean we must map
all of it? In the early 1990s, Mark Turner suggested just that.
(1) In metaphor, we are constrained not to violate the image-schematic structure
of the target; this entails that we are constrained not to violate whatever image-
schematic structure may be possessed by non-image components of the target.
(2) For those parts of the source and target determined to be involved in the
mapping, import to the target as much of the generic-level structure of the
source as is consistent with (1). (Turner 1992: 5, 6)
If Turner is right in that formulation, we can expect not just coherence between
target and source, but also that the metaphor will make use of generic similarities
to the fullest: The constraint is also a motivation. If we are just talking about the
basic projection between one domain and another, Turner’s suggestion seems
relatively unproblematic. That is what probably moved Turner to say, “The com-
bination of (1) and (2) constitutes a version of what George Lakoff and I have
called the Invariance Hypothesis. When I feel less tentative about it, I call it the
Invariance Principle” (Turner 1992, 6).
Such a full-use requirement, however, can have large implications when we
consider an additional sort of metaphoric entailment. Metaphors do not just
entail their own image-schemas but also sub-metaphors. Here is how Lakoff
and Johnson sum up that phenomenon in Metaphors We Live By with regard to
time-money metaphors:
The metaphorical concepts time is money, time is a resource, and time is a

valuable commodity form a single system based on sub-categorization, since
in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable
commodities. These sub-categorization relationships characterize entailment re-
lationships between the metaphors: time is money entails that time is a limited
resource, which entails that time 1s a valuable commodity. (Lakoff and John-
son 1980: 9)
It is easy to see how such entailment relationships may affect the extendibility
of metaphors–especially if invariance involves the necessity of mapping rather
than a mere coherence requirement. If invariance requires the mapping of image-
schemas from one domain to another, it would also seem to require the mapping
of image-schemas from entailed sub-metaphors. For perfect storm, the mapping
would have to include not just the main image-schema of multiple, co-occurring
storms, but also all of the image-schematic elements of the entailed metaphors
Business Is (Nautical) Travel and Economic Conditions Are Weather.
Of course, the full-use requirement is not a dead certainty. For one thing,
invariance has always been more hypothesis than principle. The value it has
in the current discussion is, I believe, to help us make sense of the param-
eters of metaphoric extendibility. Even if the invariance hypothesis does not
hold without exception – we shall see in a moment that, in fact, it does not –
it does highlight what is ordinarily so about metaphors. In its weaker version,
the minimum requirement of metaphoric projection is image-schematic coher-
ence. To have that, there must be a projection of at least some of the source’s
image-schema onto the target. In its stronger version, we must project all of the
image-schema from source to target. And, indeed, that requirement may apply
to entailed metaphors, also. That gives us some range of what we might expect
from a productive conceptual metaphor.
While the invariance hypothesis gives us some sense of minimum expecta-
tions, it says nothing about how far metaphoric projection can extend – except
to say that it must extend coherently. A better sense of figurative invention is
provided by Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Far more than
Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Blending Theory emphasizes the spontaneous
creativity of figurative thought. (I would hasten to point out that this is not
a shortcoming of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, whose original impetus was
refuting a view of metaphor that posited unconstrained – unbridled – creativity.)
Blending Theory maintains the notion of coherent projection. Gilles Faucon-
nier and Mark Turner describe this image-schematic projection as a correspon-
dence between generic input spaces. But the creative process does not end there.
According to Blending Theory, figurative construction is a multi-stage process,
the final stage of which is elaboration. As Fauconnier and Turner often put it,
230 Philip Eubanks
we not only find or create generic correspondences between mental spaces, we

also run the blend. If we imagine that our life is a journey, we see generic cor-
respondence between a journey and the course of a lifetime, and that permits us
to construct any number of imaginative additions and to make inferences that
are a product of running the blend.
That is precisely what Frost does in the two life-is-a-journey poems I cited
earlier. The generic correspondence between domains or input spaces provides
coherence, but Frost’s scenes include non-essential elaborations such as the
thick undergrowth in “The Road Not Taken” and the horse and carriage in
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening.” Such elaborations function, in part,
to provide atmosphere, but there is more than that to the elaboration process. In
a blended space, new inferences become available that cannot exist in the input
spaces alone. For example, the protagonist in “The Road Not Taken” declares
that his chosen path has “made all the difference.” This difference–presumably
unanticipated experiences on the less-traveled pathway – cannot exist in the
journeying space separately from the life space; neither can it exist in the life
space separately from the journeying space.1
It may seem quite a different matter to discuss the poetic inventions of Robert
Frost and the possibilities of perfect storm in economic discourse. I raise these
examples to make this point. Among current metaphor theorists, it is generally
accepted that there is no principled difference between ordinary and literary
language. However, that assertion is not the same as saying that metaphors are
extended in only one way. It is true that metaphoric expressions can be extended
to some degree simply by making use of the entailments of an underlying con-
ceptual metaphor. But a literary use of metaphor tends to go beyond that –
it tends toward the deliberate construction of elaborate conceptual blends. As
Ingrid Piller explains, extended metaphors are “literary (as opposed to ordinary-
language) metaphors that are consciously (as opposed to out of necessity) sus-
tained throughout a text or discourse (as opposed to isolated use)” (Piller 1999).
Perhaps the only way to detect the upper limit of metaphoric elaboration
is hardly surefire: to look for awkwardness. Teachers of written composition
usually encourage students to experiment with extended metaphors. At the same
time, though, they warn young writers about the hazards of going too far. The
fact is, the greater the extension of the metaphor, the more likely it is to seem
strained.
1. This sort of productivity was noted by Max Black in his interaction theory of
metaphor, and it is a key to Peter Stockwell’s criticism of the invariance hypothe-
sis.
Literacynet.org (“Writing Extended Metaphors” 2010), for example, encour-

ages young students to experiment with metaphoric invention by selecting an
animal from one list and an object from another list in order to craft a metaphoric
passage. Students are urged to choose “randomly with no thought of similari-
ties or differences,” presumably because discovering the similarities is the point
of the exercise. One suggested pairing is monkey and lightning. By follow-
ing the instructions, literacynet.org shows us, you can create a passage such as
“Lightning-Monkey moves like a flash, leaping fast across the trees, loud as
thunder that strikes at night, falling down like a bright sparkle.”
Whether or not this passage is successful is a matter of taste. Clearly, though,
it would not take much to make the lightning-monkey passage feel strained –
perhaps just by adding something about a severe thunderstorm warning, an
element that could logically apply both to the presence of lightning and to
the potential threat posed by the monkey. The problem is, severe thunderstorm
warning does not contribute to the portrait of speed and excitement that is the gist
of the example sentence. The passage could also be made to feel strained simply
by piling extension on extension. The monkey’s bent arms could be likened to
the shape of a lightning bolt, the touch of the monkey’s hands to lightning strikes,
the heat of the monkey’s body or emotional intensity to the heat of the lightning
bolt, and so on. No matter how coherent the extended metaphor, sooner or later
it will become tiresome. Extended metaphors are risky.
3. The Extendibility of Perfect Storm
Perfect storm can be extended, clearly. It’s less clear that these extensions indicate
submersible entailments. That is, in cases in which perfect storm is not extended,
it’s not clear that the extensions noted in this section lurk in the background or if
they disappear altogether. Nonetheless, perfect storm seems to be as extendable –
and perhaps as risky – as any other metaphor.
When I first began thinking about perfect storm in economic language, I
mentioned the topic to a colleague. He immediately pronounced it a wonderful
metaphor – full of rich implications. His explanation, however, was at odds with
the examples I had found. Recalling the movie version of The Perfect Storm, he
pointed out that what really got the main characters into trouble was their eco-
nomic motive. They would have returned to port, said my colleague, if they had
not been intent on preserving the fish they had caught. This was surely a clever
insight. But I suspect that does not rely very much on what perfect storm entails.
My colleague was prompted conversationally to invent as much as he could
in relation to perfect storm. However, the question at hand is how perfect storm
232 Philip Eubanks
functions in the public discourse of economics. In order to get a sense of its

workings, I selected twenty-one articles that (1) discuss perfect storm in relation
to economic catastrophe, (2) address a public audience in a venue that permits
deliberate metaphoric flourishes, and (3) use perfect storm in the title. I thought
it important that perfect storm appear in the title because that placement signals
the conceptual importance of the metaphor and would make it more likely to be
extended – in contrast to the many metaphors-in-passing that appear in almost
any piece of writing.
Of the twenty articles I analyzed, only four extend perfect storm beyond
mentioning the phrase itself and, in some cases, explaining in literal terms what
the phrase means. Of those four extended metaphors, one extends it with a
single word, saying that it would take time for “clouds” to disappear (Harrison).
Another mentions “gathering clouds” and a “typhoon of bad debt” (O’Grady).
Another is slightly more elaborate, referring to “setting sail” on a relatively
“tranquil sea” only to face “headwinds,” a “hail storm,” and a “tidal wave”
(Regalia). Those elaborations are restrained, but they do indicate the presence
of the storm image-schema.
One article extends the metaphor quite inventively. That is, it has the charac-
ter of literary invention rather than merely making explicit what the metaphor
entails. The title is “The Perfect Storm that Could Drown the Economy.” It says
that the American economy “may be sailing into choppy waters.” It refers to
the “forces propelling and buffeting the economy.” The perfect storm is likely
to “gather overseas.” Thus consumers need to “keep the economy afloat.” It
worries that “as the clouds gather and the wind stiffens, we sail onward, with
no apparent adjustment in course, full steam ahead” instead of taking “evasive
action.” (Gross 2005, emphasis added) Plainly enough, the passage recruits both
Business Is (Nautical) Travel and Economic Conditions Are Weather.
Indeed, it extends the metaphor in the way one might expect–in accordance
with these entailed metaphors. It supplies many elaborations that are coherent
with, though not essential to, the metaphors – elaborations such as propelling
and buffeting forces, stiffening winds, the speed of travel (full steam ahead),
and an apparently conscious decision not to take evasive action. As it extends
the metaphor, new inferences become available, as Blending Theory predicts.
The disaster not only looms, economic actors either fret or fail to fret about it,
move or fail to move in relation to the impending threat, and are vulnerable to
a distantly gathering storm that they may or may not take seriously.
In short, the apparent potential of perfect storm is fulfilled – and fulfilled in
the predicted manner. Even the risk of feeling strained is there. As always, the
detection of stylistic strain is a matter of judgment. However, by the time we sail
onward into stiffening winds, refusing to take evasive action, either the metaphor
wearies or we do. Extended metaphors always stand a chance of deflating rather

than enhancing rhetorical effect. (We might call this the lightning-monkey effect,
in honor of literacy.net’s exercise.)
4. Perfect storm as a Limited Metaphor
The great majority of the examples that I identified – eighty percent – treat
perfect storm as a fixed expression. Of course, even expressed minimally, perfect
storm has substantial explanatory power that is metaphoric in nature. In these
instances, perfect storm – or to give it the status of a conceptual metaphor Multi-
Faceted Problems Are Coinciding Storms – is much like basic metaphors such
as Argument Is Conflict, Problems Are Burdens, and Trade Is War. It provides an
image-schematic way of understanding a situation and also suggests the nature
of the situation and actions that can be taken about it. Perfect storm, in other
words, tells us that a large problem was unanticipated because of, or can be
addressed most effectively by responding to, a group of mutually exacerbating
problems that combine to magnify devastation.
Indeed, three of the articles explicate the meaning of the metaphor along
those lines. One explains, “A single bad event, by itself, is rarely a cause for
worry. But put that single bad event together with another seemingly unrelated
bad event and, well, there could be serious trouble ahead” (Greenfield 2007). An-
other uses the phrase “a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing trends and policy
mistakes” (Boskin 2008). Others invoke the phrase and support it with a list of
negative events. (The lists vary even when describing the same economic catas-
trophe, however.) Perfect storm is powerful shorthand for converging causes.
Too powerful to suit many. In 2007, Lake Superior State University’s public re-
lations department awarded perfect storm first prize among nineteen affronts to
the English language, a list that included such grating phrases as it is what it is
(Stern 2007). The reason perfect storm has attracted such criticism goes beyond
its ubiquity. Many point out that despite its apparent usefulness, it has come to
mean less than it should. One blogger, the Cliché Slayer, complains: “People
are beginning to use the phrase to describe neutral or even favorable events (I
heard a sport-talk radio host use it to describe how a player signed with a new
team). It would be better to talk about coincidences or serendipity to describe a
series of events” (Cliché Slayer 2010).
The use of perfect storm to describe positive events certainly gives us reason
to suspect that when it is not extended, its entailments are few. In one of the
articles I examined, perfect storm is used to describe a positive outcome for
micro-breweries (Honan). That is, the perfect storm is a confluence of changing
234 Philip Eubanks
consumer behaviors that lead them to consume boutique beers rather than com-
peting products. The idea of stormy destruction may not entirely disappear in
this instance: perhaps stormy weather for wine makers and mass-market brewers
means sunny days from micro-breweries. But, in some non-economic instances,
the broader implications of the metaphor seem to go entirely by the wayside. The
website of a local television station discusses conditions favorable for growing
grass–sunshine, moisture – and concludes that they form “the perfect storm for
golf courses” (Schugel 2010). Clearly, the most basic mapping of perfect storm
is absent in this example: Sub-storms do not equal bad events, and they do not
combine to form a large and damaging storm. In fact – bizarrely – the elements
of a perfect storm for golf courses are actually good weather.
That may seem to be simply an infelicitous use of the expression. It certainly
seems to violate the invariance hypothesis. But while such non-mappings are
not expected, they are not unheard of either. I.A. Richards (1936: 104–105)
jousts with the eighteenth-century philosopher Lord Kames over the expression,
uttered by Shakespeare’s Othello, “steep’d me in poverty to the very lips.” Kames
says that for that to make sense we must imagine poverty to be a liquid and that
the resemblance is too weak to be apt. Rather than defend the aptness of the
metaphor, Richards claims that it must be viewed in context: Othello has at that
moment a “disordered mind” and thus utters a disordered metaphor. After all,
poverty is an absence, liquid a presence. The similarity is not too weak; it does
not exist at all. Yet – as Richards points out with respect to other metaphors – we
have no trouble understanding it. Nor do we have trouble understanding other
non-mappings that have been analyzed through the lens of Blending Theory
such as dig one’s own grave (Coulson 2000: 168–171) and the statement of
Shakespeare’s King John “pour down thy weather,” spoken to a messenger who
is figuratively, and probably literally, below the king (Turner 1996: 64–66).
Yet even if we can easily understand seemingly incoherent metaphors, these
aberrations do call into question how much a metaphor can entail. In my sam-
plings of perfect storm, I found some non-mappings – not unlike steep’d me in
poverty to the very lips. Consider two elements of a perfect storm mentioned
by several commentators: weak consumer spending and banks’ unwillingness to
lend. Neither is an event that maps topographically from source to target. Storms
are filled with furious upheavals; a drop in consumer spending or a bank’s failure
to lend are both absences of activity. Perhaps that seems pedantic. But, as we
have just seen, coherent mapping is not required in order for us to understand a
metaphor. In fact, as we saw above, good weather can be a storm in the context
of a perfect storm.
So we can observe this much about the character of perfect storm at its upper
and lower limits. When it is extended, it seems to be constrained as Conceptual
MetaphorTheory and BlendingTheory would predict.That is, it maps specifiable

entailments. When it exceeds those entailments, the mapping remains in keeping
with the generic image-schema of perfect storm. Moreover, the mapping is
in keeping with the compatible metaphors Business Is (Nautical) Travel and
Economic ConditionsAre Weather. It can even extend far enough to feel strained.
At the lower end, however, it behaves differently. In some non-economic uses,
it can violate the most basic assumption about the meaning of the metaphor so
that perfect storm becomes positive. Likewise, in economic discourse, it can also
non-map – that is, it can violate the generic image-schema of an ordinary storm-
economy mapping – as when the activity of a storm is mapped as economic
inactivity. In economic discourse, it is often explicated in its most basic terms, a
matter of multiple factors leading to a bad result and nothing more. All of these
things suggest that non-extended versions of perfect storm may not merely be
abbreviated forms of a tacitly operating conceptual system.
We are not in a position to say definitively whether or not, in cases where
perfect storm is not extended, the metaphor lacks further entailments. Entail-
ments, after all, exist in people’s minds, not in utterances themselves. We cannot
assume that something does not exist just because it is not expressed. However,
the persistent lack of elaboration of perfect storm, the lack of variation in the
way it is expressed, and the non-mappings that sometimes occur – all of these
things should cause us to set aside the opposite assumption as well. We cannot
assume that because perfect storm can be extended that non-extended instances
merely leave most of the metaphor submerged. It is at least as reasonable to
assume that perfect storm is used in ways that have little or nothing to do with
its more extended forms.
5. Five Possible Explanations for the Perfect Storm Conundrum
When perfect storm is extended, credible explanations are available from Con-
ceptual Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory. But when it is used minimally,
the picture is not so clear, simply because it is more difficult to account for
what is not spelled out than to account for what is said expressly. Some possible
explanations for perfect storm’s variability come to mind, and I offer what I
believe are the most plausible of them here.
– Perfect storm’s entailments are simply tacit in the non-elaborated examples
I collected. We must admit this possibility. If the entailments did not exist at
all, there would be little likelihood that extended versions of the metaphor
would preserve their structure. However, if they do remain viable but in the
background, there may be reason to suspect that they are buried very deeply.
236 Philip Eubanks
Indeed, phenomena such as the non-mappings would suggest that tacit entail-
ments are so far in the background that they have lost significant influence.
– Perfect storm’s image-schema is illustrative in and of itself and thus does not
call for elaboration. As Jeanne Fahnestock has shown, many figures – not
just metaphors – structure scientific explanations. In particular, antithesis, the
figure that tells us that an entity is this not that, provides an image-schematic
framework that is frequently key to scientific explanations. Despite its evo-
cation of the storm domain, perfect storm provides a strong image-schematic
illustration of the causal relationship between events. In the non-extended ex-
amples I collected, it may well be that the illustration of causal relationships
was sufficient. Thus further elaboration was not rhetorically relevant.
– Perfect storm is suffering an early demise. It may be premature to call perfect
storm a dead metaphor. At the same time, however, extended examples of
perfect storm are not necessarily evidence of its vitality. As Max Black has
pointed out, some metaphors are merely moribund and are easily awakened.
The leg of a table is a good example. Any competent cartoonist could de-
pict a dancing table, and we would make sense of the appendages as vitally
metaphorical legs. Perfect storm is used frequently enough to have drained
much of its life. A Google search of “the perfect storm” retrieves 922,000 hits.
– Perfect storm is often crowded out by stronger metaphors. The texts that
included non-extended examples were not bereft of standard economic
metaphors. Quite the contrary. They included many metaphors of vertical-
ity (e.g., rising and falling markets), health metaphors (e.g., toxic assets and
economic pain), mechanical metaphors (e.g., economic engine), gambling
metaphors (e.g., casino capitalism), and more.
– Writers choose not to extend perfect storm as a matter of taste. As we have
seen already, extended metaphors always carry with them the risk of becoming
strained. Indeed, in the one significantly extended example I examined, my
writing-teacher’s ear detected no great violation of good taste. At the same
time, however, the standard advice about extending metaphors seems sound:
While extending metaphors can sometimes be handled expertly, the safer
course is restraint.
6. Conclusion
In this article, I have analyzed perfect storm as if we should expect it to be subject

to the same motivations and constraints that apply to all instances of conceptual
metaphors. Although it is a new metaphor in a way – a novel coinage, traceable

to a particular author – perfect storm has some of the important characteris-
tics associated with conceptual metaphors. It has become, very quickly, well
entrenched in a discourse; it is used more or less conventionally; and its con-
figurations are well-explained by embodiment. For those reasons, it seems to
me worthy of notice that, in spite of all that is consistent with what we know of
conceptual metaphors, perfect storm behaves in unexpected ways – ways that
tell us something new about how a metaphor can function.
The variability I have observed in perfect storm is, perhaps, not more ex-
treme than can be found with other metaphors, but it has a different quality. In
an earlier study of war metaphors in economics, I observed a strong pattern in
the configuration and rhetorical use of Trade Is War. In its sparest form – trade
war – the metaphor always suggested aggressive actions against economic com-
petitors, and it was virtually always used in a condemnatory way. It was ascribed
to trade rivals as a way of characterizing their bad intentions or behavior. For
example, U.S. trade commentators of the early 1990s continually accused Japan
of fomenting a trade war. The trade war version of Trade Is War was consistent
with more elaborate instances, which often included accusations that aggressive
trade rivals wanted to conquer markets, destroy competitors, and so on.
Yet, despite that conceptual and rhetorical stability, we don’t have to look
far to find substantial variation. Consider Trade Is War’s close cousin, Business
Is War. In that context, the war metaphor takes on a positive coloration and,
rather than being ascribed to others as an epithet, is proudly claimed by those
who utter it. A car-dealership television ad promotes a “war” between Ford and
Chevy that is framed as a re-enactment of the American Civil War, complete
with military uniforms and the sound of gunfire (Eubanks 2000, 141–142). An
article in a business magazine praises a consultant whose motto is “business is
war” (Eubanks 2000, 61). Nonetheless, the use of the Business Is War metaphor
is less at odds with Trade Is War than it might seem. The mappings of aggressive
action are consistent. The consequences of economic competition are the same.
The difference is mainly a matter of tone. Trade Is War is used earnestly, Business
Is War playfully. And, we should note, war is often glorified
Even a very odd version of Business Is War tends to confirm rather than
disrupt the overall conceptual and rhetorical pattern. Consider the one-time
secret motto of price-fixers within the large agribusiness Archer Daniels Mid-
land: The competitor is our friend; the customer is our enemy. In most trade
discourse, Trade Is Friendship is contrasted with Trade Is War. Trade Is Friend-
ship is constructive rather than destructive, cooperative rather than competitive.
But ADM’s secret motto changes all of that. Friendship is not cooperative but
collusive, not constructive but corrosive, not open and healthy but closed and
238 Philip Eubanks
corrupting. Furthermore, although war is still destructive, it destroys the wrong

target – an enemy who believes itself to be a friend – and glorifies a perverse
way of conducting business as war. As unusual as this version of the war and
friendship metaphors may be, it varies from convention only in order to use it as
a foil. The rhetorical force of ADM’s motto depends on the flouting of ordinary
ideas of right and wrong – both in the use of the metaphor and in dealing with
customers. (Eubanks 2000)
In the case of perfect storm, the variations in configuration and tone are
significant in a very different way. True, perfect storm is sometimes used with
a positive slant in the same way that Trade Is War shifts its perspective. But
the positive uses of perfect storm reveal something startling about the way the
metaphor maps. Rather than simply shifting in rhetorical tenor while retaining
the same fundamental capacity, a positive version of perfect storm seems only
to be possible if the usual implications of the metaphor are erased. It makes no
sense to think of stormy weather or a rough ocean passage as a beneficial factor
leading to a positive result. Thus the full implications of storm are erased.
If that is so for the positively slanted version of perfect storm, it may also be
true for other non-extended versions of the metaphor. Indeed, the non-extended
versions seem to be at least different in character and probably different in
kind from the extended versions. In only one sense are all instances of perfect
storm clearly of a piece. Perfect storm always denotes multiple factors leading
to a single result. It has a consistent point. Yet that very pointedness may permit
some instances of perfect storm to function separately from the metaphor system
in which it often participates – to suppress the storm image-schema and related
metaphors of floating, sinking, and traveling, leaving intact only the implication
of converging multiple causes. In those instances, I suspect that the possibilities
that ordinarily attend perfect storm are not submerged so much as they are erased.
When that happens, perfect storm fails to fulfill what we would ordinarily expect
of it. It is incomplete – imperfect.
Acknowledgement
I want to express my gratitude to Paul Petrovic, who is a Ph.D. candidate in

Northern Illinois University’s Department of English, for assisting me with
research for this essay.
References
Primary Sources
Boskin, Michael J.
2008 Our next president and the perfect economic storm: Obama could
help markets by changing his tune on tax hikes and protectionism.
23 October. WSJ.com. http://online.wsj.com/article/NA WSJ
PUB:SB122471873203460579.html. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Brady, Jonann
2009 Perfect storm of bad economic news. ABC News.com. 9June.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/story?id=5029794.
Accessed 22 May 2010.
Conroy, Scott
2008 Palin warns of “perfect storm” of economic woes. CBS News.com.
19 September. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-502443 162-4459828-
502443.html. Accessed 22 May 2010.
CNN
2008 Zakaria: Perfect storm hitting U.S. economy. CNN.com. 11 July.
(http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/global/1x1pixel.gif)
isn’t in document http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/07/
10/zakaria.useconomy/index.html?iref=newssearch.Accessed 22 May
2010.
D’amour, Rosemary
2009 US: “Perfect storm” in economy has Tribune Co. filing for bankruptcy.
Editorsweblog.org. 9 December.http://www.editorsweb-log.org/
newspaper/2008/12/us perfect storm in economy has tribune.php.
Dingle, Derek T. and Alan Hughes
2002 Navigating rough waters: steering their companies through an eco-
nomic storm, America’s leading black executives are facing their bold-
est challenges yet. Black Enterprise. February: 86–87.
Gewen, Barry
2008 A perfect storm gathering over the economy. The New York Times. 22
April. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/arts/22iht-bookwed.3.
12230524.html. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Factor, Mallory
2010 U.S. economy: The perfect storm? Hudson New York. 27 January.
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1010/us-economy-the-perfect-storm.
Greenfield, Steve
2007 The perfect storm in the American economy – what the dollar’s decline
really means. Collectivewizdom.com.
http:/www.collectivewizdom.com/ThePerfectStormIntheAmerican
Economy.html. Accessed 22 May 2010.
240 Philip Eubanks
Gross, Daniel
2005 The perfect storm that could drown the economy. New-YorkTimes.com.
8 May. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/weekinreview/
08gross.html?pagewanted=print. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Harrison, Jeff
2007 Two UA economists predict Arizona and the nation will weather the
housing market, but not without some pain along the way. UA News.
7 December. http://uanews.org.node/17237. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Honan, Edith
2009 Economy unleashes “perfect storm” for boutique beer. Reuters.com.
17 August. http://www.reuters.com/article/
idUSTRE57G2VL20090817. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Kaletsky, Anatole
2009 Eurozone braces itself for the perfect storm. The Times. 9 April.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole
kaletsky/article6062204.ece. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Kuttner, Robert
2007 American’s economic perfect storm. The Boston Globe. 21 December.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial opinion/oped/articles/
2007/12/21/americas economic per-fect storm/.
O’Grady, Sean
2007 Is Britains’s economy heading for the perfect storm? The Independent.
5 December. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/is-
britains-economy-heading-for-the-perfect-storm-762869.html.
Porritt, Jonathon
2009 Perfect storm of environmental and economic collapse closer than you
think. Guardian.co.uk. 23 March. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
environment/2009/mar/23/jonathon-porritt-recession-climate-crisis.
Regalia, Martin
2007 Is there a “perfect storm” on the horizon? U.S. Chamber Magazine.Au-
gust. http://www.uschambermagazine.com/article/is-there-a-perfect-
storm-on-the-horizon. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Roberts, Paul Craig
2009 Economic policymakers have created a perfect storm. VDare.com. 3
June. http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090603storm.htm. Accessed 22
May 2010.
Ryall, Julian
2009 Japanese economy hit by “perfect storm.” Telegraph.co.uk. 30 January.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnewsasia/ japan/4394451/
Japanese-economy-hit-by-perfect-storm.html.Accessed 22 May 2010.
Schugel, James
2010 Spring weather comes early for golfers. WCCO.com. 22 May.
http://www.wcco.com/local/spring.weather.early.2.1581557.html Ac-
cessed 22 May 2010.
Scott, Roman
2008 The Perfect Storm: Semi-Annual Economic Review. Seeking Alpha.
30 November. http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/ arical
4770.shtml. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Tanneeru, Manav
2009 How a perfect storm led to the economic crisis. CNN.com. 29 January.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/29/economic.crisis.explainer/
index.html. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Secondary Sources
Black, Max
1993 More about Metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought,
2nd edition, 19–41. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Cliché Slayer, The
2009 Perfect storm, 1 April. http://slaycliches.blogspot.com/2009/04/
perfect-storm.html. Accessed 22 May 2010.
Coulson, Seana
2000 Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning
Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eubanks, Philip
2000 A War of Words in the Discourse of Trade: The Rhetorical Constitution
of Metaphor. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Fahnestock, Jeanne
2004 Preserving the figure: consistency in the presentation of scientific ar-
guments. Written Communication, 21.1: 6–31.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner
2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Com-
plexities. New York: Basic Books.
Johnson, Mark
1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Reasoning and
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to
Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, George
1993 The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (ed.)
Metaphor andThought, 2nd edition, 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP.
242 Philip Eubanks
Lakoff, George
1996 Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t.
Chicago: U of Chicago Press.
Piller, Ingrid
1999 Extended metaphor in automobile fan discourse. Poetics Today, 20.3,
483–498.
Richards, I.A.
1936 The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stern, Andrew
2007 Perfect storm of clichés make bad English list. Reuters, 31 Decem-
ber. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN284697052007123.1. Ac-
cessed 22 May 2010.
Stockwell, Peter
1999 The inflexibility of invariance. Language and Literature. 8.2: 125–
142.
Turner, Mark
1992 Language is a virus. Poetics Today 13: 725–736.
Turner, Mark
1996 The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
Writing Extended Metaphors
2010 Literacynet.org. http://literacynet.org/alaska/extended.html.Accessed
22 May 2010.
Framing a bank: Reputation management during
financial crises
Lise-Lotte Holmgreen
Abstract
Maintaining a good image and reputation in the eyes of stakeholders is vital to the
organisation. Thus, in its corporate communication and discourse the organisation will
seek to present itself as favourably as possible while observing regulations stipulating
accuracy and precision in the information given. However, in this process the organisation
is not operating in a social vacuum but is continuously interacting with various players,
such as the media, for its discursive construction. This article will focus on the role of
this interaction in metaphorically and conceptually framing a large Danish bank, Danske
Bank, during the 2008 financial crisis and hence in shaping its image projected to the
public. Through the study of a number of semantic frames adopted by the Danish print
press and those adopted by the Bank, this article will argue for the constructions of the
press putting considerable strain on the Bank and its image, leading it to reconsider its
previous strategy of denial of responsibility.
1. Introduction
In 2008, economies worldwide were hit by what was considered the most dev-
astating financial crisis since the Great Depression. Starting as a problem in
the American housing market, the crisis spread from the US economy to the
rest of the world’s advanced economies through an intricate system of risky
investment and speculation. Important players in this connection were large in-
ternational banks which bought bundles of loans, so-called derivatives, from
American financial institutions, indirectly accepting part of the risk involved in
the US provision of subprime loans to homeowners with little creditworthiness.
Among the banks accepting this risk was Danske Bank, the largest bank in the
Danish financial market. For many years, Danske Bank enjoyed the position of
unrivalled supremacy in the Danish financial sector. During its existence, the
Bank has been considered a prudent actor in the market, known for its business
acumen and its timely investments; however, in the late 2000s this image became
somewhat tainted, not only due to the above risky investments, but reputedly also
244 Lise-Lotte Holmgreen
due to the Bank’s provision of loans and credits to questionable business projects
as well as its acquisition of unprofitable financial institutions abroad.
In this way, Danske Bank’s situation is similar to that of a number of other
financial institutions across the Western world. What is interesting, however,
from a cognitive-linguistic point of view, is the dramatic downfall taken by the
Bank in the eyes of the public, the severe damage this has done to its otherwise
solid reputation, and, not least, the conceptual strategies adopted by the Bank to
address this situation, i.e. the frames the Bank constructs for itself to counter-
act allegations of e.g. mismanagement. To give an account of these issues, an
analysis of the discursive and metaphorical constructions used to conceptually
frame the Bank over the year following the onset of the crisis is relevant – both
in parts of its own corporate communication material and in the print press. The
rationale of such action is that through the study of discursive and metaphori-
cal framing, it is possible to pinpoint preferred constructions of reality as well
as the argumentative and persuasive steps taken – altogether providing a pic-
ture of the Bank’s discursive and conceptual actions as well as its (preferred)
image.
2. Constructing image
However, before moving on to this point, it is important to account for the

contextual and participatory factors (i.e. the actors) influencing and shaping
the Bank’s discourse and hence its image. Gunnarsson (2009: 197) explains:
“The discursive/textual creation of the organization takes place collectively, in
interaction between various players, both inside and outside the organization”,
in this way creating an image that may result in goodwill, confidence and a good
reputation. The point of Gunnarsson’s remark is relevant in this context. That is,
if we want to know something about Danske Bank’s discursive and metaphorical
strategies for securing a good image vis-à-vis its stakeholders, we also need to
know something about influential actors outside the organisation. And here,
the media play an important role. As is well known, the media are powerful
in shaping and controlling public opinion through the discursive construction
of events and affairs (see e.g. Fairclough 1989, 2008; Van Dijk 1988, 1991).
By reproducing dominant discourses in the public domain, i.e. the discourses
of influential groups such as, in this case, the political establishment, financial
experts and consumer groups, the media may help sustain certain interpretations
of the state of affairs that are very difficult to change and even challenge. For
banks as for other organisations, this is a feature of social reality that needs
to be addressed. Therefore, good relations with the media are paramount, and
banks are increasingly aware of the need of proactively approaching the press
on various matters to let their view on the state of affairs or events in the bank
be heard and recounted (Gunnarsson 2009).
However, maintaining a good rapport with the press is not the only way
to cultivate one’s image and reputation. Organisations are increasingly aware
of the necessity of producing external corporate communication material that
is of a promotional nature, complementing its more informational aspects and
strengthening their control of the image presented. By way of example, the
annual report is increasingly being invaded or colonized by genres of a promo-
tional character, opening up to highly persuasive and personalized styles (Bhatia
2004, 2008; Fairclough 1995). This is, incidentally, also quite often the material
studied by the press for its presentation and comments on the financial standing
of a business or bank, underscoring the importance of such documents as well
as the good rapport mentioned above.
Over the years, the linguistic, rhetorical and communicative aspects of public
relations have been studied from various perspectives (see e.g. Bülow-Møller
2003; Heath et al. 2009; Holmgreen 2008; Hyland 1998, 2005; Van Riel et
al. 2007). However, one approach, that of framing, holds an advantage that
many previous approaches do not: it “offers the potential of subsuming and
tying together many of these seemingly unrelated approaches” (Hallahan 1999:
205), while at the same time linking the conceptual with the rhetorical/linguistic
levels of communication within and between groups and organisations. Thus,
as a theory that has the constructionist approach to meaning as its foundation,
framing allows the public relations worker to define reality for the organisation
and its members as well as for the organisation’s many external stakeholders.
Likewise, it provides us, the analysts, with a framework for analysing the ways
image is constructed by the organisation itself as well as its stakeholders. In the
case of Danske Bank, framing may then be studied to assess how the Bank has
fared in its attempts to steer a discursive and conceptual course in the financial
crisis. In the following, framing will be discussed in more detail.
3. Framing
From a public relations perspective, Entman (1993: 55) defines framing in the
following way: “To frame is to select some aspects of perceived reality and
make them more salient in the communication text, in such a way as to promote
a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or
treatment recommendation for the item described”.
Central to this definition is the emphasis on framing as a method or process

through which speakers or writers may emphasize, include or exclude specific
elements of a given subject matter in order to bias the cognitive information
processing of their receivers. Framing, then, becomes a valuable tool for the
public relations worker, as an organisation’s communication with the outside
world is essentially about making stakeholders see things the organisation’s way,
cf. above. However, the question is how the selection of elements takes place.
Depending on their philosophical background, scholars have explained in
at least two different ways how the framing process works. Thus, it is either
seen as functioning through a provision of contextual cues or through priming
(Hallahan 1999). Both are relevant for understanding framing and frames in
the cognitive linguistics tradition, which is the foundation on which metaphor
theory, as it is used in this article, is understood. By seeing lexical meaning
as being ‘encyclopaedic’ in nature, the cognitive linguist considers the sense
of a word to arise in its context of use, i.e. contextual factors determine the
selection of particular aspects of the associated encyclopaedic meaning, whereas
encyclopaedic meaning itself arises from the interaction of different kinds of
knowledge emerging from everyday experience. In other words, lexical items
are access points to a network of underlying encyclopaedic knowledge stored
and encoded in memory as schemas or frames (Evans and Green 2006).
The concept of semantic frames, which is the term adopted for the above
approach, is often associated with the work of Charles Fillmore (1975, 1982)
and refers to the coherent organisation of human knowledge required to under-
stand a particular word or sentence. As such, frames are idealized, skeletal and
continuously updated and modified on the basis of on-going human experience.
What frames do is that they give meaning to the words or sentences we use to
talk about our experiences by relating the elements and entities associated with
a particular situation or event. Thus, for instance to understand the word ‘sell’,
we need to know something about commercial transfer, its participants (seller,
buyer, etc.) and entities (money, goods, etc.) as well as the relations between
these and the processes involved (Evans and Green 2006; Kövecses 2006). These
elements and entities need, however, not be mentioned explicitly, but will be in-
ferred once the commercial transfer frame has been accessed (Luchjenbroers
and Aldridge 2007).
4. Framing and conceptual metaphor
Semantic frames can be based on metaphor, with particular source domains

framing particular target domains. Conceptual Metaphor Theory is the approach
explaining this mechanism. The theory has become widely known, first through
the work of Lakoff and Johnson ([1980] 2003), and subsequently through the
work of scholars who have developed the ideas and concepts further (see e.g.
Charteris-Black 2004; Chilton 1996; Johnson 1987; Kövecses 1986; Lakoff
1993; Lakoff and Turner 1989). The theory holds that metaphor is not exclusively
a linguistic phenomenon, as Aristotelian approaches to metaphor would claim,
but is first and foremost cognitive. From this follows that our realisation about
abstract concepts is conditioned by our previous experience and interaction with
the surrounding world, in terms of space, objects and substances, rendering
tightly structured transfers of meaning (mappings) from a physical domain of
experience onto a less tangible, less well-known domain.
To exemplify how metaphors may be used for framing, an oft-used example
is Lakoff’s discussion of tax relief versus tax cut. The metaphorical phrase tax
relief was used by the former Bush Administration to promote the understanding
that cutting taxes is a necessary and morally right thing to do. The underlying
assumptions guiding this construction are that when we talk about ‘relief’, we
normally talk about being freed from pain stemming from e.g. an affliction. In
the frame this phrase evokes, a number of elements are present. These are the
affliction, the person who is afflicted, yet another person who gives the relief,
and the action or process of giving this relief. In this frame, the provider of the
relief is constructed as ‘the good guy’ and anyone who tries to prevent the relief
from being administered or achieved is the ‘bad guy’. Thus, when combining
the phrase ‘relief’ with taxes, a metaphor emerges that signals cutting taxes is
the right thing to do (Kövecses 2006; Lakoff 2003).
Previous studies suggest that metaphors may coincide with, lean on or be
entailments of frames constructed through other lexical items in the text to
explain or elaborate on the inferential power of these frames, and consequently
any analytic process will need to go beyond metaphors to include as many
features of the whole frame as possible (Luchjenbroers and Aldridge 2007). In
consideration of this, the subsequent analysis will look at non-metaphorical and
metaphorical frames simultaneously.
5. Data
The data analysed in this article are from the Danish print press and Danske
Bank’s website, respectively.
The newspaper articles were retrieved from the web-source, Infomedia.dk,
the leading Danish database for print and web-based articles in the Danish press.
This part of the data, which is a small collection of articles from the major Danish
broadsheets1 , is from the period of October 2008, when the financial crisis was
at its highest, to November 2009, when things had calmed down somewhat and
signs of a possible, but weak recovery were beginning to show. The reason for
including data from the print press is that they will provide information on how
the Bank was framed in parts of the media while rendering the possibility of
studying whether and how the Bank and its representatives (most notably the
CEO, Peter Straarup) were given ‘space’, i.e. whether they were quoted in the
press. This is interesting from a framing and discourse perspective as it will
provide insight into the degree of ‘access’ given to the Bank, and hence of its
possibilities of addressing and challenging the criticism voiced by among others
the media. At the same time, the timeline of one year provides the possibility
of studying the various discursive and metaphorical strategies used by the Bank
in the press for managing the image crisis it was facing. To be remembered
is, of course, that this information is relayed at the discretion of the press (as
quotes or references) and should therefore be interpreted with some caution. The
reason for including it, nonetheless, is that the information is difficult to access
through Danske Bank’s own sources, and that it is necessary for understanding
the Bank’s strategies of reframing.
The data from the Bank’s own sources were retrieved from the Bank’s website,
more specifically the pages detailing the contents of the Bank’s image campaign
initiated in October 2009. The campaign was initiated as a response to the year’s
heavy criticism and may be seen as an attempt to change or at least improve the
tainted image this gave rise to. In the campaign, the Bank addresses the criticism
voiced by the public, providing details of a number of action points or steps they
would like to take in order to become a “better bank”. Note should be made that
the criticism not only stems from what could be read or heard in the media, but
also from a campaign preceding the one analysed here, in which the Bank let
the average bank customer give voice to his/her discontentment with the Bank’s
business conduct.
In the following, the data are analysed chronologically, starting with an article
from October 2008 and ending with the campaign in December 2009.
6. Framing of Danske Bank
From the literature on framing, seven different models relevant for public rela-
tions work can be defined. One of these is news framing, which deals with the
way news stories are framed by the media through the use of “familiar, culturally
1. These include the broadsheets Jyllands-Posten (right of centre), Politiken (slightly

left of centre), and Berlingske Tidende (right of centre).
resonating themes” (Hallahan 1999: 210). As noted in in the Introduction, news

framing or discourse may be considered a tool used by the media to advance
particular views of the world, and in the case of Danske Bank this seems to be
no exception. Thus, as will be detailed below, the discursive choices made by
the press establish the frame(s) against which alternative frames emerging from
e.g. the quotes of the Danske Bank CEO, Peter Straarup, and the Bank’s website
must be established and understood.
The presentation of the Bank’s activities and standing seems to be guided by
at least two key issues or scenarios. One is the financial situation and problems of
the Bank, whereas the other is focused upon the Bank’s image and its strategies
for managing the crisis. In this and the following sections, these two issues
provide the starting point for analysing the framing of the Bank in the press as
well as in its own corporate communication material, i.e. its website.
6.1. Framing of Danske Bank in the press

The analysis in this section will be based on a selection of newspaper articles
that may be considered exemplar2 of the way the press handled the Danske
Bank affair (for further details on these articles see the end of the chapter). Not
surprisingly, a ‘crisis’frame provides the background against which other frames
in the articles are understood. However, this frame is not, as one may expect, a
frame that only emerges from the general financial situation, but one that also
has to do with the financial situation of the Bank itself. Thus, there seems to be
a ‘crisis in the crisis’ which is constructed as being, if not more critical than the
financial crisis, then at least equally severe. The following examples show the
point at which this crisis begins to take shape (Berlingske Tidende, 7 October
2008):
(1a) Danske Banks ubestridte position som Danmarks suverænt største fi-
nanskoncern er under alvorligt pres. Finanskrisen koster Danske Bank
dyrt . . .
‘Danske Bank’s unchallenged position as Denmark’s undisputedly largest
financial group is under heavy pressure. The financial crisis costs Danske
Bank dearly . . . ’
(1b) Samtidig har banken – trods dages tavshed – kæmpet med en række
alvorlige problemer på flere markeder.
‘At the same time, the Bank has – despite several days’ silence – struggled
with a number of severe problems in several markets.’
2. The articles are considered exemplar in the sense that they reflect the general attitude
of the Danish broadsheet press towards the Bank and its actions at the time.
(1c) Bedre blev det ikke mandag, hvor Danske Bank aktien fik en regulær
øretæve og dykkede med graverende 15,8% – det største enkeltfald i
bankens historie.
‘Monday was no better when the Danske Bank shares received a regular
blow and plunged by a critical 15.8 per cent – the largest individual drop
in the Bank’s history.’
The examples in (1) show the potential crisis emerging from a series of unfor-
tunate events that threaten the Bank’s existence as well as its leading position in
the market (cf. “The financial crisis costs Danske Bank dearly” (1a), “. . . severe
problems in several markets” (1b) and “. . . the largest individual drop in the
Bank’s history” (1c)). Although the crisis is not fully developed at this point,
there are indications that this may well be the end result. According to studies on
the typology of crises (Johansen and Frandsen 2007), a number of factors may
contribute to defining such a situation. One of these may be whether the situa-
tion fits the general characteristics or manifestations of a crisis. Johansen and
Frandsen (2007: 85) identify twelve generic dimensions, of which at least two
are characteristic of the situation Danske Bank finds itself in, in October 2008.
Thus, in this perspective, Danske Bank’s situation may qualify as a (looming)
crisis as it
– is a situation where action appears to be an urgent necessity
– is a period or situation in which the control of events and their effect is reduced.
In (1), the sentences point to urgent action being needed: the situation costs the
Bank money (e.g. its shares have lost a lot of value), and it has a number of
unresolved and apparently uncontrollable problems on its hands. However, our
understanding of the severity of the situation does not stem so much from the
general lexical choices as from the metaphors invoked in the text. Metaphors may
not only be used to provide understanding of complex or abstract concepts by
drawing on previous physical and social experience, but may also function as a
deliberate means of imparting writer attitudes and evaluations to the reader (Eu-
banks 2000; Holmgreen and Vestergaard 2009). Thus, the Bank is constructed
as being “under heavy pressure” (1a), it is “struggling with problems” (1b), and
its shares have received “a regular blow” and have “plunged by a critical 15.8
per cent” (1c). These are all constructions that have powerful appeal. Not only
do they involve physical force, action and motion, which are aspects closely
connected to basic human experience with a physical world, they are also a way
for the writer to impart his evaluation of what happens in the Bank and thus
invoke particular associations in the reader. Thus, the assessment the reader will
make of the Bank’s situation may vary with the ‘emotional’ content of the cho-
sen lexical items and metaphorical constructions. By way of example, there is

a difference in the inferences to be made from a bank which is ‘dealing with’
problems and a bank which is ‘struggling’ with these, with the latter invoking
a larger sense of trouble than the former. Likewise, ‘falling’ shares would be
far less dramatic than ‘plunging’ ones. For a bank, which is supposed to make
money, not lose it, a situation constructed in the way indicated in (1) qualifies
indeed as a crisis and calls for immediate action.
However, immediate action may be difficult to take when control of the
situation is lacking. For Danske Bank, this seems to be the case. Having enjoyed a
position of unrivalled supremacy and full control in the Danish financial market,
the Bank must now see its position challenged, first and foremost because of its
lacking control of the situation (Berlingske Tidende, 7 October 2008):
(2a) Problemet for Danske Bank er, at banken har vist sig langt mere eksponeret
over for krisens konsekvenser end iagttagerne havde troet.
‘The problem for Danske Bank is that the Bank has proven far more
vulnerable to the consequences of the crisis than observers had thought.’
(2b) I dag tumler Danske Bank og topchef Peter Straarup med en hel palet af
udfordringer.
‘Today Danske Bank and CEO Peter Straarup struggle with a whole range
of challenges.’
In (2), the Bank is framed as the unwilling, afflicted part in the crisis, resulting
in a change of position both relative to its competitors (as noted in (1a)) and
in terms of strength: it is “vulnerable” (2a) and “struggling” (2b), in this way
constructed as person who must fight for his survival.
However, the framing of the Bank as a weakened and struggling actor in
the Danish financial market is not an image that the CEO, Peter Straarup, will-
ingly accepts. Instead, in the same article, he tries to downscale the problems,
attributing the crisis to external factors that not only influence Danske Bank but
all banks in the market:
(3a) “At vi taber lidt mere end forventet i en ekstraordinær situation som denne,
finder jeg kun naturligt”.
“‘I only find it natural that we lose a little more than expected in an
extraordinary situation like this.”’
(3b) “. . . i virkeligheden er også de større danske banker hårdt ramt – de kan
ganske enkelt ikke låne penge på det internationale pengemarked. . . ”
“‘. . . in reality, the large Danish banks are also severely hit – they are quite
simply unable to borrow money in the international money market . . . ”’
Instead of accepting the Bank as being weakened, the CEO frames its general
position and standing in the market as relatively unchanged. When doing so,
he uses different strategies to emphasize what he considers to be a natural and
common experience among the banks. Thus, in (3a), the external financial crisis
(“an extraordinary situation”) provides the background for framing the Bank,
making it possible for the CEO to construct as normal (i.e. losing large sums
of money) what would, under more normal circumstances, be considered dis-
quieting. Likewise in (3b), the claim that all banks are in the same situation is
made on the assumption that they share the experience of not being able to bor-
row money (underscored by the (metaphorical) expression “also severely hit”).
Thus, instead of accepting the ‘Danske Bank crisis’ frame as the basis of his
constructions, the CEO takes his starting point in the ‘financial crisis’ frame,
effectively removing focus from the Bank to external conditions.
To strengthen his claim that there is a general problem in the money market –
and not in the Bank – the CEO resorts to metaphorical constructions (see (4a)
and (4b)) that extend the inferences to be made from the ‘financial crisis’ frame
by emphasising the impenetrability and uncontrollability of the market:
(4a) “. . . det internationale pengemarked, som er helt sandet til.”
“‘. . . the international money market, which is all sanded up.”’
(4b) “. . . det internationale pengemarked, som er frosset helt fast.”
,“. . . the international money market, which is all frozen.”’
The metaphorical constructions “all sanded up” (4a) and “all frozen” (4b) sug-
gest that the workings of this market are beyond human control and instead
under the influence of forces similar to those of nature, generating a kind of
force-majeure situation. The inferences to be made from these constructions are
that acts of nature may be seen as accidents which are unintentional, random and
may happen to any business during normal operations, and hence, this construc-
tion may convince the reader that problems of inaccessibility and control are not
exclusive to Danske Bank but equally problematic for all banks in the sector.
Attributing responsibility for a crisis to outside factors or a third party is inter
alia known as excuse or denial of intention in the crisis management literature,
and the aim of this strategy is to minimize the organisation’s responsibility for
the crisis (Coombs 1995). Attributing the reasons for a crisis to external factors,
such as the forces of nature, is a strategy that may win the public’s sympathy
for the affected business; however, as will become apparent further below, the
continuous inacceptance of responsibility on the part of the Bank’s CEO may
eventually be seen as lack of judgement and hence as damaging to the Bank’s
image.
As 2008 turns into 2009, the framing of Danske Bank changes in the press.
During spring, the ‘crisis’ frames continue to be invoked in the coverage of the
Bank; however, the press is assigning more of the Bank’s problems to the Bank
itself and its management, and less to the external financial crisis. This, appar-
ently, is a result of information that had become known to the wider public on the
Bank’s investments and transactions in the years up to the crisis, which included
investing in extremely risky business projects and acquiring non-profitable for-
eign banks. Thus, in May 2009, an opinion article (in Jyllands-Posten, 11 May
2009) gives the following headline and lead:
(5a) Kommentar Bankvæsen: Danske Syge
‘Commentary Banking: Danish Disease’
(5b) Trods milliardindtjening har Danske Bank efter alt at dømme været
tvunget til at søge ly hos staten [dvs. modtage en af flere bankpakker]
for at sikre sin eksistens. At det er gået så galt . . . skyldes i høj grad
svigtende dømmekraft i bankens direktion og bestyrelse.
‘Despite billion kroner earnings, Danske Bank has, by all appearances,
been forced to seek shelter with the State [i.e. receive one of more rescue
packages] to ensure its existence. That things have gone so wrong . . .
is to a large extent due the lack of judgement on the part of the bank’s
management and board.’
Through the metaphorical constructions of “disease” (5a) and “seek shelter”
(5b), the article constructs the Bank as a weak person unable to manage on
his own and make the decisions required by the situation. This allows the
writer to introduce and invoke a ‘management’ frame. This frame involves
among other things a number of participants (e.g. managers and employees)
and entities (the company, its products etc.) and the relations between these
(e.g. that management sets the principles and guidelines for the running of the
company and thus is responsible for its survival in terms of securing a prof-
itable outcome of its activities). In this frame, the implicit understanding is that
management is an entity which is competent and knowledgeable and conse-
quently capable of running a sound and profitable business. However, with the
introductory metaphors in (5a) and (5b), this understanding is rejected, allow-
ing the writer to construct Danske Bank’s management as incompetent, and
therefore largely responsible for the Bank’s crisis, in (5b) (cf. “lack of judge-
ment”).
This is the predominant view promoted in the article, underscored by con-
trasts made to the Bank’s former image as a prudent and responsible actor in the
financial market. Thus, the writer points out in vivid and creative metaphorical
terms (underlined in (6a)) that the Bank has compromized its normal sense of
propriety in the quest for profits:
(6a) I årevis havde Danske Bank ry for at levere en indtjening i europæisk
topklasse uden at gå på kompromis med snusfornuftigt købmandskab.
Men mere vil have mere. I takt med at Banken voksede ud af Danmark,
voksede den tilsyneladende også ud af sin forsigtigt tilpassede bankhabit.
‘For years, Danske Bank had the reputation of delivering European top-
class earnings without compromising prudent business acumen. But much
would have more. As the Bank grew out of Denmark, apparently it also
grew out of its carefully fitted bank suit.’
In crisis management, an organisation’s past performance, if positive, is consid-
ered as creating credibility for an organisation (Coombs 1995). In this article,
this seems not to be the case. Rather, past positive performance serves to under-
line Danske Bank’s recent poor performance.
In the Jyllands-Posten article, the voices of Danske Bank and CEO Peter
Straarup are hardly heard. There are no direct quotes, only reference to previous
statements made by the CEO. Not being quotes, these statements can easily be
interpreted by the writer in relation to the main point of the article, viz. that the
Bank management betrayed its obligations to run a sound and profitable bank
and consequently is responsible for the present situation. Thus, constructions
like the following serve to question the judgement of the Bank and its CEO in
relation to the crisis:
(7a) Vel handler miseren, som Danske Bank chef Peter Straarup hævder, om
en bank, der blev ramt af international finanskrise og udbredt recession.
. . . Men en nærmere analyse af storbankens økonomi afslører også et an-
det billede: Danske Bank er i krise, fordi virksomheden var ualmindeligt
dårligt forberedt på at håndtere finanskrisen, da den ramte.
‘It is true, as Danske Bank boss Peter Straarup claims, that this unfor-
tunate affair is about a bank which was hit by an international financial
crisis and widespread recession. . . . But closer inspection of the bank’s
finances also reveals another picture: Danske Bank is in crisis because the
company was extremely badly prepared for handling the financial crisis
when it hit.’
The understanding readers may get from constructions like the ones italized in
(7a) is that the CEO’s statements are an imprecise account of the sequence of
events and state of affairs. Thus, Peter Straarup “claims” whereas the newspaper
makes accurate conclusions based on detailed analysis (cf. “closer inspection”
which “reveals”). Consequently, the newspaper stands to be the part believed by

the readers.
In late summer 2009, the release of the half-yearly report leads the Bank
and its CEO to make headlines again. With results being less than impressive,
speculations emerge as to whether the CEO, Peter Straarup, will be fired. This
question, along with the performance of the Bank and its management, be-
comes the subject of discussion in an interview carried by Jyllands-Posten on
13 August. Here, the CEO gets the opportunity to defend his position, actions
and views against the allegations of mismanagement and lack of judgement.
The ‘management’ frame is the primary frame invoked through the discursive
constructions; however, only part of the frame is explicitly invoked, i.e. that of
management and its actions in relation to the critical situation of the Bank:
(8a) Opkøbene af banker i Irland og Finland var gode beslutninger baseret på
godt håndværk, påpeger den ordførende direktør.
‘The acquisition of banks in Ireland and Finland were good decisions
based on good craftsmanship, the CEO points out.’
(8b) “Det er min vurdering, at de beslutninger, vi har truffet, . . . har været
fornuftige med den viden, vi havde på det tidspunkt. . . . Men jeg mener
ikke, at man kan gå tilbage og sige til ledelsen, at vi ikke gjorde vores
hjemmearbejde godt nok, da vi traf de beslutninger.”
“‘In my judgement, the decisions we made . . . were reasonable with the
knowledge we possessed at the time. . . . But I don’t think you can go back
and say to management that we didn’t do our homework well enough when
we made those decisions.”’
Across the six lines of argument given in (8), there is once again an insistence that
the Bank management is not to be made responsible for the disastrous financial
results (cf. “good decisions” (8a), “the decisions . . . reasonable” (8b)). This,
despite the fact that, as mentioned, in the spring of 2009, many details on the
Bank’s business transactions were revealed which suggested that previous years’
investment decisions had been relatively rash and ill-founded. In (8), the CEO
resorts to metaphorical strategies that may serve to stress his credibility and
hence strengthen the claims he makes. Thus, he uses expressions such as “good
craftsmanship” (8a) and “homework” (8b) which emphasize the solidity and
credibility of the decisions. Expressions like these derive their meaning from a
tradition that predates industrial mass production in which thorough preparation
as well as quality and skills in production are important sources of success –
an understanding which, when transferred to the situation at hand, suggests that
the CEO knows the fundamentals of his trade.
No doubt, the position of the CEO, Peter Straarup, is also the result of his
having enjoyed an impeccable image as manager of one of the most successful
banks in the Danish financial market – an image he hopes to make good use
of in the situation. Thus, Danske Bank and its CEO’s positive performance
history is assumed to create a “halo effect” for the organisation, extending its
credibility and trustworthiness of past times into this period of crisis (Coombs
1995). However, as will be detailed below, the strategy chosen by the CEO may
not be appropriate in a situation where much points to the wrong decisions
having been made and the image of the Bank being flawed. Instead, the attempt
to build an overly confident ethos must be tempered by the need to openly admit
responsibility for the problems that are becoming increasingly obvious to the
public.
6.2. Reframing the Danske Bank image

After nine months of denying responsibility, Danske Bank comes to the con-
clusion that matters must be set right. Thus, in the summer of 2009, the Bank
reconsiders its promotional strategy and changes its previously fitting slogan
“Gør det, du er bedst til – det gør vi” (“Do what you are best at – that is what
we do”) into something more appropriate for the situation. At first, this leads
to the campaign “Sig din mening” (“Tell us what you think”) where customers
could express their views of the Bank and its actions in a dedicated video blog.
The more than 3000 statements made during this campaign subsequently led to
the image campaign, the “Bedre Bank” (“Better Bank”) campaign, launched on
September 28, 2009.
The “Better Bank” campaign was launched on the Bank’s website and is a
combination of the Bank’s own written contributions and a blog where customers
can debate the Bank’s initiatives and actions. As the focus in this article is on the
Bank’s framing, the following analysis will be centred on its own contributions.
The Bank’s initiatives are based on the criticism voiced by customers. Thus,
in an article in Politiken on 28 September 2009, metaphorical expressions such
as “grådig, fjern, uansvarlig og uigennemsigtig” (“greedy, distant, irresponsi-
ble and opaque”) are reported to have been used by customers for describing
the Bank, echoing the criticism increasingly made by the press in the year since
the financial crisis started. In fact, an analysis carried out by the index EPSI3 in
3. EPSI stands for Extended Performance Satisfaction Index which “collects, ana-
lyzes and disseminates information about image, preferences and perceived qual-
ity as well as loyalty of customers, employees and other stakeholders to commer-
cial entities, NGOs, governmental bodies and other organizations” (http://www.epsi-
denmark.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=43)
October 2009 indicated that Danske Bank had the largest number of dissatisfied
customers in the Danish financial market. With customers being the lifeblood of
banks, this may be seen as the decisive factor in the Bank’s decision to initiate
a reconstruction of its image. Consequently, under “Better Bank” Danske Bank
launches a number of improvements in the shape of three action points, or initia-
tives, namely “Ansvarlighed, Nærvær og Gennemsigtighed” (“Responsibility,
Presence and Transparency”), which are, incidentally, terms that are direct op-
posites of the ones used by the customers. Although these steps do not qualify
as an apology in the common sense of the word, they are indicative of the Bank
accepting responsibility for the outcome of its actions and the current situation.
In turn, they also point to the Bank recognising customers’ fears that its losses
will inflict damage4 and to it being willing to take action to address these fears.
In the crisis management literature, this is known as corporate apologia, which
subsumes a number of crisis-response strategies. Among these is apology or
mortification, which in the current case is a way of winning forgiveness and
soothing stakeholders, convincing them that the crisis is over and will not af-
fect them financially. Due to the indirect admission of guilt, this is a strategy
which is believed to hurt the organisation’s image initially; however, redressing
the crisis may subsequently repair the image (Bülow 2008; Coombs 1995). The
question is, however, whether in this case, the Bank’s image has not already
been damaged and that any strategy aimed at eliminating the problems would
be beneficial.
The above initiatives involve a number of metaphorical and discursive choices
that define two primary frames, alternative to the ‘crisis’ frames invoked in the
press. The three keywords Responsibility, Presence and Transparency suggest
the invocation of a ‘responsibility’and an ‘engagement’frame, respectively, ded-
icated to re-establishing public trust in the Bank. Besides what the Bank’s own
experience shows, studies indicate that strategies which aim at fostering trust
in a company and its good intentions are particularly important for businesses
such as banks that specialize in intangible products or services (Jørgensen and
Isaksson 2008). For Danske Bank, therefore, taking steps that may convince
stakeholders of its dedication to moral, sound business conduct and customer
satisfaction is paramount.
Each of the three initiatives is elaborated on in the website. This is done by
three managers whose titles suggest they have closer contact with customers
4. As a result of the Bank’s losses, customers may think that damage will take the
form of higher interest rates on loans, difficulty in borrowing money, higher fees on
transactions, etc.; in short, they may fear that the customers will be the ones to bear
the burden of the Bank’s losses.
than the CEO, Peter Straarup; a choice which is, no doubt, a deliberate strategic
move. Furthermore, a general feature of the elaboration is the seriousness with
which the complaints are now taken:
(9a) Vi har også et ansvar for at drive vores forretning på en fornuftig og solid
måde, så vores kunder kan føle sig trygge . . .
‘We are also responsible for running our business in a sensible and sound
way for our customers to feel safe . . . ’
(9b) Alt for mange opfatter os som fjerne og distancerede, og det kan vi ikke
leve med.
‘Far too many consider us distant and aloof, and that we can not live with.’
(9c) Vores kunder har efterlyst større åbenhed om priser og gebyrer.
‘Our customers have called for greater openness about prices and fees.’
In (9a), terms such as “responsible” and “safe” stress this new attitude together
with a number of metaphorical constructions in (9b) and (9c). These, “aloof”,
“distant” and “openness”, are constructions based on orientational and con-
tainer metaphors, respectively, which are grounded in the human body and
its interaction with surroundings (Kövecses 2006; Lakoff and Johnson 2003).
As such, they serve to tell us something about the relation between the Bank
and its customers in specific and basic terms such as whether the Bank can
be approached and accessed or not. Due to their basic experiential grounding,
these constructions may initially seem inconspicuous; however, in the context
they become highly value laden (cf. Section 6.1) as they are marked as either
undesirable, i.e. as something the Bank can “not live with” (9b), or as desirable,
i.e. as something that customers have “called for” (9c).
A feature of all three initiatives in dealing with the complaints is also the
focus on personal contact and strategies for meeting customers’ demands and
wishes. Thus, there is involvement of the reader through the consistent use of
the personal pronouns “we”, “you”, “ours” and “yours” together with various
predicates that signal engagement. These features signal inter alia an interest in
addressing the reader’s situation and empathizing with his/her values and goals
(Hyland 2005) as demonstrated by the examples in (10) (e.g. “to be close to you”
and “us . . . together” (10a); “understand your situation” and “take our starting
point . . . possibilities” (10b), “talking to you” and “explaining to you” (10c)):
(10a) At være tæt på dig som kunde er en hel basal forudsætning for, at vi
sammen kan finde de bedst mulige løsninger.
‘To be close to you as a customer is a prerequisite for us finding the best
possible solutions together.’
(10b) Vi skal sætte os ind i din situation og tage afsæt i dine udfordringer og
muligheder.
‘We must understand your situation and take our starting point in your
challenges and possibilities.’
(10c) Vi vil være bedre til at tale med dig om priser, forklare dig hvordan de er
skruet sammen . . .
‘We want to be better at talking to you about prices, explaining to you
how they are put together.’
Besides these constructions, a number of metaphorical expressions are used in
the introduction to the blog to signal commitment to changing behaviour and
accepting responsibility. First and foremost, these expressions function as a form
of self-examination and a pledge of action, and consequently they pave the way
for invoking the ‘responsibility’ and ‘engagement’ frames rather than constitute
them. Thus, metaphorical constructions that, in Danish, are commonly thought
to illustrate what you do when making a concerted effort are invoked:
(11a) . . . [vi har] vendt spejlet mod os selv . . .
‘ . . . [we have] held the mirror up to ourselves . . . ’
(11b) . . . vi er trukket i arbejdstøjet . . .
,. . . we have put on our working clothes . . . ’
(11c) . . . vi justerer vores service, tilgængelighed og åbenhed over for dig.
‘. . . we adjust our service, accessibility and openness to you.’
The three methaphorical instantiations in (11) emphasize the process the Bank
has gone through to reach its present stage of involvement. They do so by
conceptualizing the stages of the process as concrete, physical actions which
collectively may lead to the desired goal of becoming a better bank. This may
resonate with many of the Bank’s customers as making a concerted effort towards
change is often associated with engaging heavily in the work to be carried out
and changing the physical make up of the organisation. Thus, we see a process
consisting of three levels of action, the first one being that of self-reflection
(“held the mirror up to ourselves” (11a)), the second that of starting the process
of change (“put on our working clothes” (11b)), and the third and final step
being that of reaching the result of the process (“adjust our service . . . ” (11c)).
Together the three steps metaphorically construct the process and its end result
as an object that can be handled and altered by putting in hard work/concrete
physical actions to meet the needs and wishes of the customer. This may leave
readers with the impression that the Bank is dedicated to the task, pursuing it
determinedly. In other words, the above metaphorical constructions may be quite
convincing to readers, suggesting that this time the Bank is in earnest about its
promise to change.
7. Conclusion
This analysis points to the complex discursive systems in which today’s organi-
sations must navigate. With the liberal credo guiding financial markets and with
an impeccable image to support its leading position, Danske Bank, one of the
most reputable and successful Danish financial institutions, could easily be con-
sidered impervious to the effects of bad decision making and ensuing criticism,
and so, be able to control its own (discursive and conceptual) fate, achieving
the position of a ‘Teflon’ bank. However, the analysis shows that this is not the
case, and that despite a performance history of past successes and superiority,
any organisation is faced with the continuous need to negotiate its image with
other influential players in the public domain, such as the media.
It is generally acknowledged that the media play an important part in shaping
public opinion, and disregarding this role may prove fatal to the future life
of an organisation. For Danske Bank, the framing by the media has not led
to its demise, but it undoubtedly assisted in painting a less favourable image
than its CEO would have liked. From the analysis of the various newspaper
articles, it is clear that although having a lot of symbolic capital to draw upon,
the Bank and its CEO are unsuccessful in presenting themselves in positive
terms. This may be ascribed to the existence of an unusual sense of unanimity
across the newspapers as to the morally and ethically reproachful behaviour
of the Bank’s management, increasingly supported by the examples emerging
over the year of risky and ill-considered past decisions. However, a decisive
factor in the construction of the Bank is the use of conceptual and metaphorical
frames and their resonance with the attitudes of readers. The survey made by the
Bank in the summer of 2009 showed that greed, distance, irresponsibility and
opaqueness were what most customers associated with and disliked about the
Bank. This, as indicated in the analysis, echoed the conceptual frames adopted
by the press in the year since the start of the financial crisis. However, when
comparing these constructions to those of CEO Peter Straarup, we see that he is
clearly out of step with these stakeholders’ wishes. His resistance to construct
the Bank’s actions along a ‘management’ frame, continuously focusing on a
‘financial crisis’ frame, only serves to reinforce the impression that the Bank
displays irresponsibility and distance to what is considered the real problems.
Thus, metaphorical constructions that are meant to serve as an indication of
business acumen and moral, sound business conduct are lost on customers, and
most likely also on the readership of the newspapers, and not until its 180-degree
turn in early autumn 2009, does the Bank seem to realize the urgency of adopting
conceptual frames that directly and unconditionally address the demands of its
lifeblood, the customers.
In the broader perspective of conceptual and metaphorical frames, the anal-
ysis indicates that metaphors may not be the primary means through which
frames are instantiated; instead metaphors seem to function as ways of adding
evaluation to the frames introduced by other lexical items, thereby extending the
inferences of these, rather than to exist in the text as frames in their own right.
This underscores one of the important discursive functions of metaphors, viz.
to draw on cognitive aspects with the aim of achieving strategic communicative
goals.
References
Bhatia, Vijay K.
2004 Worlds of Written Discourse – A Genre-Based View. London/NY: Con-
tinuum.
Bhatia, Vijay K.
2008 Towards critical genre analysis. In Advances in Discourse Studies,
Vijay K. Bhatia, John Flowerdew, and Rodney H. Jones (eds), 166–
177. London/New York: Routledge.
Bülow-Møller, Anne Marie
2003 Tekstargumentationen, eller sagen om den enarmede direktør [Text
argumentation, or the case of the one-armed manager]. In Language
Travels – A Festschrift for TorbenVestergaard, Alan Firth (ed.), 43–53.
Viborg: Special-Trykkeriet.
Bülow-Møller, Anne Marie
2008 Corporate apologia. In Rhetorical Aspects of Discourses in Present-
Day Society, Lotte Dam, Lise-Lotte Holmgreen, and Jeanne Strunck
(eds), 340–358. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Houndmills: Pal-
grave.
Chilton, Paul A.
1996 Security Metaphors – Cold War Discourse from Containment to Com-
mon House. New York: Peter Lang.
Cienki, Alan
2005 Metaphor in the “Strict Father” and “Nurturant Parent” cognitive mod-
els: Theoretical Issues raised in an empirical study. Cognitive Linguis-
tics 16 (2): 279–312.
Coombs, Timothy W.
1995 Choosing the right words: The development of guidelines for the se-
lection of the “appropriate” crisis-response strategies. Management
Communication Quarterly 8 (4): 447–476.
Entman, Robert M.
1993 Framing: Toward a clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of
Communication 43 (4): 6–25.
EPSI Denmark
2009 Downloaded on 6 January 2010 from http://www.epsidenmark.org/
index.php?option=content&task=view&id=43
Eubanks, Philip
2000 AWar ofWords in the Discourse ofTrade – The Rhetorical Constitution
of Metaphor. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press.
Evans, Vyvyan and Melanie Green
2006 Cognitive Linguistics – An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press.
Fairclough, Norman
1989 Language and Power. London/NY: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Fairclough, Norman
2008 Kritisk Diskursanalyse – en Tekstsamling. [Critical Discourse Analy-
sis – a Text collection] Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.
Fillmore, Charles
1975 An alternative to checklist theories of meaning. In Proceedings of the
First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 123–131.
Amsterdam: North Holland.
Fillmore, Charles
1982 Frame semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, Linguistic So-
ciety of Korea (ed.), 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing.
Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise
2009 Professional Discourse. London/NY: Continuum.
Hallahan, Kirk
1999 Seven models of framing: Implications for public relations. Journal
of Public Relations Research 11 (3): 205–242.
Heath, Robert L., Elizabeth Toth and Damion Waymer (eds.)
2009 Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations II. New York:
Routledge.
Holmgreen, Lise-Lotte
2008 Communicating financials in the biotech industry: A strategic deci-
sion? In Rhetorical Aspects of Discourses in Present-Day Society,
Lotte Dam, Lise-Lotte Holmgreen, and Jeanne Strunck (eds), 359–
373. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Holmgreen, Lise-Lotte and Torben Vestergaard

2009 Evaluation and audience acceptance in biotech news texts. Journal of
Pragmatics 41: 586–601.
Hyland, Ken
1998 Exploring corporate rhetoric: Metadiscourse in the CEO’s letter. The
Journal of Business Communication 35: 224–245.
Hyland, Ken
2005 Metadiscourse. London/NY: Continuum.
Johansen, Winni and Finn Frandsen
2007 Krisekommunikation [Crisis communication]. Frederiksberg: Sam-
fundslitteratur.
Johnson, Mark
1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and
Reasoning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Jørgensen, Poul Erik Flyvholm and Maria Isaksson
2008 Building credibility in international banking and financial markets.
A study of how corporate reputations are managed through image
advertising. Corporate Communication. An International Journal 13
(4): 365–379.
1986 Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2006 Language, Mind and Culture – A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Lakoff, George
1993 The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought,
Andrew Ortony (ed.), 202–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lakoff, George
2003 Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how
conservatives use language to dominate politics. UC Berkeley News,
October 23 2003. Available at http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/
2003/10/27 lakoff.shtml
[1980] 2003 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Turner
1989 More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago:
Chicago University Press
Luchjenbroers, June and Michelle Aldridge
2007 Conceptual manipulation by metaphors and frames: Dealing with rape
victims in legal discourse. Text & Talk 27 (3): 339–359.
Van Dijk, Teun A.
1988 News as Discourse. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Van Dijk, Teun A.
1991 Racism in the Press. London: Edward Arnold.
Van Riel, Cees B.M. and Charles M. Fombrun

2007 Essentials of Corporate Communication: Implementing Practices for
Effective Reputation Management. London: Routledge.
Articles and other data sources

Danske Bank, the ‘Bedre Bank’ campaign. Http//:bedrebank.dbhosting.dk/index.php.
Retrieved on 22 December 2009.
‘Magtbalancen er ved at tippe’ [The power balance is shifting], Berlingske Tidende,
7 October 2008.
‘Kommentar bankvæsen: Danske syge’[Commentary banking: Danish disease], Jyllands-
Posten, 11 May 2009.
‘Interview: Straarup: Jeg bliver’ [Interview: Straarup: I’m staying], Jyllands-Posten,
13 August 2009.
‘Danske Bank: Vi har været arrogante’ [Danske Bank: We’ve been arrogant’], Politiken,
28 September 2009.
Metaphor and knowledge specialization in business
management: The case of project management
discourse
Hanna Skorczynska
Abstract
The present study provides empirical data for vertical metaphor variation on the con-
ceptual and linguistic levels in a sample of general business management discourse and
its more specialized type, project management discourse. Vertical, referring to metaphor
changes within one field of knowledge, from the general base to a higher level of special-
ization, is used here as opposed to more horizontal metaphor variations, which unfold
across the discourses of different fields of knowledge. The hypothesis for this study is
that in the dynamics of knowledge specialization certain metaphors from the general
level of a particular field are re-exploited at a more specialized level providing distinct
cognitive constructs and different metaphorical expressions. Two corpora were used for
this study and the metaphors identified were analyzed and compared with regard to the
source domains involved, as well as the frequency of the metaphor vehicles and their
collocates. The results showed that building, journey and nautical metaphors are more
widely used in the specialized discourse sample of project management, as compared
to the general business discourse sample. The most frequent metaphor vehicles from
the three source domain mentioned are also lexically primed for distinct words in the
project management discourse sample, where they very often operate as subject-specific
specialist terms.
1. Introduction
Descriptions of metaphor stabilities and variations in different types of dis-

course, that is, in real contextualized language uses, provide insights into its
dynamic nature (Zanotto, Cameron, and Cavalcanti 2008). The dynamics of
metaphor usage can be researched from the perspective of its horizontal vari-
ations, which include diachronic accounts, as well as synchronic records of
metaphorical uses across the discourses of various disciplines. The present
study provides empirical data on what I will call vertical metaphor variations
in relation to metaphor uses on the different levels of knowledge specialization
266 Hanna Skorczynska
within one discipline, as in the present case of business management and its
more specialized sub-discipline, project management. As opposed to horizon-
tal variations in which a metaphor circulates from one area of knowledge and
its discourse to another, vertical variations develop on a vertical axis from the
general base to higher levels of specialization. No such study has been pub-
lished to my knowledge despite a large body of research on metaphor’s role in
transferring knowledge and on metaphor’s discursive and communicative func-
tions in business management. Within this context, a working hypothesis for the
present study is that the metaphor variations and stabilities in the dynamics of
knowledge specialization may involve the use of certain general level metaphors
alongside the specialist sub-field metaphors, as well as changes in the metaphor
collocational patterns in the discourse representing different levels of knowledge
specialization.
2. Metaphor as a vehicle of knowledge transfer
Metaphor’s role in transferring knowledge has been researched with regard to

scientific theory change and extension, as shifts of meaning across different ar-
eas of knowledge and as an instrument in science popularization. Metaphor was
found to be useful in pre-theoretical stages of a new discipline and in fulfilling
heuristic and pedagogical functions in the case of articulated and developed
theories (Black 1962). In mature sciences, metaphor can introduce new termi-
nology and participate in the accommodation of the existing terms to describe
the significant features of the field under examination more thoroughly (Boyd
1993). In such processes of language accommodation, metaphor also reflects
deeper cognitive changes which entail scientific theory change and extension
(Kuhn 1979). From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and within
the postmodern view, metaphor was considered responsible for the enhanced
dynamics of knowledge, characteristic of today’s knowledge society. Described
as a “locally-applied, context-dependent and hence malleable unit of knowl-
edge”, metaphor typically enters a particular discourse and interacts with other
discourses over time to change itself and the discourses that process it (Maasen
and Weingart 2000: 3). For instance, the metaphorical concept of chaos is re-
lated to the mathematics of chaos theory in economics and econometrics. In
psychology, it can be observed in the use of the vocabulary related to it. In the
field of management, it served to develop the self-organizing branch of chaos
theory, and in psychotherapy, the hidden-order-within-chaos branch (Maasen
and Weingart 2000). Metaphor, therefore, serves horizontally as a carrier of
changing meaning across different areas of knowledge.
Metaphor and knowledge specialization 267
Metaphor was also approached as a varying conceptual and discursive el-

ement in the processes involving the transition from scientific to popularized
discourse. Knudsen (2003), for instance, argued that such a variation does not
necessarily involve different metaphors, but the change of the metaphor status
and its treatment in the text. Furthermore, it was shown that metaphorical uses
vary considerably in management discourse popularizations with respect to the
number of metaphor target domains used, metaphor nominal and verbal forms,
metaphor communicative functions (Skorczynska 2001), as well as the type and
number of expressions anticipating a metaphor in the text (Skorczynska and
Piqué 2005). Therefore, as these studies report, metaphor undergoes changes in
the cognitive and discursive processes of the transfer and delivery of knowledge.
3. Metaphor in economics and business
The studies of metaphor in the disciplines of economics and business have been
concerned with the types of conceptual metaphors, the discourse-structuring role
of metaphor, its communicative functions as well as its cross-cultural variations.
The metaphorical conceptualizations of business and its different constituents,
such as market, stock exchange, currency, and organization, are described as
originating in the domains of war, mechanics and biology, and less frequently
involving travelling, meteorology and health (Alejo 2010; Charteris-Black and
Ennis 2001; Charteris-Black and Mussolff 2003; Herrera and White 2000; Koller
2004a 2004b; Skorczynska 2001; Skorczynska and Deignan 2006; Smith 1995;
White 1997, 2003). The conceptual structure is also reflected on the text level
through networks of linguistic metaphors which contribute to greater text cohe-
sion and coherence (Boers and Demecheeler 1997; White 1997, 2003). The com-
municative functions of metaphors have been discussed as ideologically-biased
decisions for alternative or opposed metaphors, and with respect to their impact
on the readers’perception of the economic reality (Boers and Demecheeler 1997;
Eubanks 1999; Koller 2004a, 2004b, 2005; Smith 1995). Furthermore, metaphor
has been identified as a useful illustrating tool, a terminological gap-filler, and
an especially effective instrument to build economic models and theories (Hen-
derson 1994, 1998, 2000; Skorczynska 2010a; Skorczynska and Deignan 2006).
Examples of metaphors used in business discourse have been described as em-
bedded in specific cultures, which provides a basis for considering metaphor-
ical uses as culturally-sensitive (Boers 1999; Boers and Demecheeler 1997;
Charteris-Black and Ennis 2001; Charteris-Black and Musolff 2003).
On the whole, metaphor in business discourse in general, as well as in its
more specialized types has been studied from different angles and considered as
actively operating on the conceptual, textual and communicative levels of this

discourse. Many of these studies have adopted a more field-specific approach
and examined metaphors in specialized samples of business discourse, such
as the discourse of marketing (Koller 2008), finance (Charteris-Black 2004;
Charteris-Black and Ennis 2001; Charteris-Black and Mussolff 2003; Smith
1995), organization (Grant and Oswick 1996; Morgan 1986; Oswick, Keenoy,
and Grant 2002), or related to mergers and acquisitions (Koller 2004b, 2005).
However, little work has been done to date to compare how metaphor is used
in general business discourse and its more specialized samples, as proposed
herein.
4. Metaphor in project management discourse
Project management is a field of knowledge that deals with directing and co-
ordinating human and material resources throughout the life of a project using
modern management techniques to achieve predetermined objectives of scope,
cost, time, quality, and participant satisfaction (PMI Standards Committee 1987:
4). This is an expanding field of research and practice led by growing profes-
sional associations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) with 260,000
members and the International Project Management Association (IPMA) with
90,000 members worldwide. A significant body of research is being published
in the international scientific journals, of which International Journal of Project
Management, Project Management Journal, and Project Management Quarterly
are the most relevant. Other communication and dissemination channels used by
project management professionals include periodicals such as PM Network, PM
World Today, Project Manager Today, or Project Perspectives. The literature in
this field covers a wide range of topics, such as planning and controlling tech-
niques, risk analysis, project leadership, investment planning, group dynamics,
computer-supported project management, or human resource management, but
adopting the perspective of project design and management.
The use of metaphor in project management discourse has received relatively
little attention from project management scholars. In this context, metaphor has
been considered both as an effective research instrument allowing for different
approaches to project management, and a socially active linguistic phenomenon
that shapes human behavior and actions (Alderman and Ivory 2007; Koskinen,
Pihlanto, and Vanharata 2003; Söderlund 2004; Whitty 2005). Metaphorical
perceptions in project management have changed from the leading metaphor of
the general systems theory (Roman 1986), wherein the project is seen as a whole,
constructed from its interdependent parts, to the project metaphor as a temporary
organization (Packendorff 1995), focusing on individuals’ actions, their social

interactions, and their continuous learning by experience. Similarly, Angling’s
(1988) metaphor of multi-project environments as the Chinese wall conveying
the idea of stability, order and predictability was later critiqued and replaced
by the metaphor of the Chinese dragon, which better reflected the dynamism
and unstable nature of this type of environments (Eskerod 1996). Interestingly,
the Chinese dragon metaphor was proposed alongside the metaphor of multi-
project environments as a zero-sum game, which according to Eskerod (1996),
faithfully rendered the lack of cooperation and exchange of knowledge between
different projects.
Despite these explicit references to the use of metaphor in project man-
agement, the research conducted so far is considerably less extensive in terms
of the number of studies reported than in other areas of business and man-
agement studies, especially in comparison to organization studies (Barry and
Hansen 2008; Clark et al. 2008; Morgan 1986; Oswick, Keenoy, and Grant
2002). The perspective adopted in project management research is also limited
to the methodological and communicative potential of metaphors. In the field
of applied linguistics, the use of metaphor in project management discourse
has not been studied in depth, with the exception of an analysis (Skorczynska
2010b), which compared two small samples of general business discourse and
project management discourse. These initial findings will be discussed herein
to provide the rationale for the present study.
5. Rationale for this research
In Skorczynska (2010b), 88 metaphor vehicles1 were electronically searched

in two, approximately 100,000 word corpora of general business and project
management discourses. The 88 metaphor vehicles were obtained in Skorczyn-
ska and Deignan (2006) and they represented 11 source domains: war, ani-
mal/human life, plant life, mechanics, illnesses/remedies, eating/drinking, jour-
ney, navigation, games/sports, hunting, and building. The electronic query of
these metaphor vehicles revealed that they were all used in the general busi-
ness corpus, but only 28 of the 88 vehicles, belonging in eight source domains
(war, animal/human life, mechanics, illnesses/remedies, journey, navigation,
games/sports, and building) were found in the project management corpus. This
corpus, thus, contained considerably fewer metaphor vehicles, but these did rep-
1. Examples of the metaphor vehicles used are: army, battle, battlefield, bull, fish,
grow, blossom, bottle up, brake, engine, hurt, indigestion, drunk, eat, bump, derail,
shipwreck, shoal, game, hunt, lure, architecture, basket.
resent a relatively wide range of domains. The vehicle frequencies also varied
in the corpora, being generally higher in the general business corpus, with ex-
ception of four items: architecture, derail, road, and steer, which were used
more often in the project management corpus. The most frequent vehicles in the
general business corpus, growth, flow, grow, were also the highest frequency
vehicles in the project management corpus, but with considerably lower val-
ues.
These initial findings allowed for tentative claims about differences in
metaphorical uses in a general and a more specialized sample of discourse within
the same domain of knowledge, suggesting the existence of interrelations be-
tween metaphor variation and cognitive processes in knowledge specialization.
In this way, certain conceptual metaphors from the general discourse would be
replicated in the specialized one, serving as a metaphorically-structured concep-
tual framework for the specialized field and its discourse. The evidence about
the more frequent uses of certain linguistic metaphors in the specialized sample
of project management discourse as compared to the general business discourse
sample also suggested that the specialized field might use their own metaphors,
which are not so frequent on the general level. In other words, knowledge spe-
cialization processes in the case of business discourse may well involve the use
of many general metaphors and others that are more common in the specialized
field of project management.
The present study therefore aims to test the hypothesis that more specialized
discourse involves a more frequent and varied linguistic articulation of certain
metaphorical conceptualizations, which in turn reflect the cognitive structure
of the corresponding more specialized subfield of knowledge. For this end,
two larger corpora of the general business discourse and project management
discourse were searched to identify metaphorical uses of the lexical items repre-
sentative of three domains: building, journey and nautical activities. These three
domains were chosen because of the higher frequencies of the four metaphor
vehicles from the project management discourse sample analyzed in the initial
study: architecture, derail, road, and steer.
6. Method of analysis
Two corpora were used in this study. The general business (GB) corpus of
1,281,834 running words consisted of articles from three business periodicals
(The Economist, Business Week, Fortune) and three research journals: Journal of
Economics and Management Strategy, Management Science Journal, Strategic
Management Journal. The business periodical articles were randomly chosen
from issues published between 1997 and 2007, and covered a wide range of
topics related to management and business, such as finance, commerce, human
resources, production, technology, communication, competition and globaliza-
tion. All articles were written by journalists specializing in business and man-
agement, and were intended for business practitioners and the general public.
The research papers addressed different aspects of management and were writ-
ten by and for scientists. The business periodical articles accounted for 60% of
the corpus, while the research papers for the remaining 40%.
The project management (PM) corpus of 377,329 running words included
articles from four periodicals targeting project management practitioners, which
were written by project managers and journalists specializing in the field Project
Management Network, Project Management Today, PM World Today, Project
Perspectives. The PM corpus also included articles from two project manage-
ment research journals International Journal of Project Management, Project
Management Journal, written by and for project management scholars. The re-
search papers were randomly chosen from the volumes published between 1997
and 2008, and therefore, covered a period similar to that by the scientific articles
in the GB corpus. However, all of the periodical articles in the PM corpus were
recent publications from 2007 and 2008, given that the online editions of these
periodicals do not include the archive collections. Like the GB corpus, the pe-
riodical articles accounted for 60% of the PM corpus, and the research papers,
40%. The composition of both corpora, the readership and the authorship of the
texts included, can be considered as comparable, in the sense that each corpus
consisted of periodical articles on the one hand, and research papers, on the
other.
Given that four metaphorically used words in the PM 100,000 word sample:
architecture, derail, road, and steer registered higher frequencies than in the
corresponding GB sample, the first phase in this study consisted in creating
the PM corpus wordlist using WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1997), and manually
searching for all words from the semantic fields of building, journey and nautical
activities. The same was not done for the GB corpus because of its size and
because this study aimed to trace the use of the potentially frequent metaphors
from the project management sample in both corpora. As a result of the manual
analysis of the project management corpus wordlist, the following metaphor
candidates were obtained. Figure 1 includes the lexemes of the words identified
in the word list of the PM corpus.
In the second phase, the GB and PM corpora were electronically queried for
the lexical items listed in Figure 1 using WordSmith Tools concordance (Scott,
1997). The concordances obtained were manually analyzed to detect possible
metaphorical uses of the items mentioned. This also allowed for a comparative
Building Journey Nautical
architecture derail anchor

bridge fuel boat
build highway float
construct journey shore
door lane steer
elevator map storm
fence path wave
floodwall rail
floor railway
gate road
infrastructure roadmap
premise track
rebuild traffic
roof train
wall tunnel
window vehicle
Figure 1. Lexemes from the semantic fields of building, journey and nautical activities
from the wordlist of the PM corpus.
analysis of the conceptual and linguistic metaphor uses in the two corpora, which
were further discussed in view of possible metaphor variations in a general
business discourse sample and its more specialized type. The results of this
analysis are presented in the section that follows.
7. Results and discussion
7.1. Metaphor vehicle frequencies

Graph 1 compares the frequencies per 1,000 words of the building lexical items
used metaphorically in the GB and PM corpora. The lexical items listed in the
graph include any inflected forms, so that, for instance, the occurrences of build,
include builds, built, and building.
Of the 16 lexical items included in Figure 1, 14 of them, except floodwall
and premise, were used metaphorically in the PM corpus. Twelve items, except
elevator, infrastructure, floodwall, and premise, were identified as metaphor
vehicles in the GB corpus. Even though the number of the lexical items used
metaphorically in both corpora is quite similar, the frequencies registered vary.
Six items: architecture, bridge, build, door, fence, gate, were used more often in
0,019
architecture 0,080
0,010
bridge 0,040
0,251
build 0,421
0,098
construct 0,048
0,003
door 0,013
0,000
elevator 0,016
0,005
fence 0,008
GB per 1,000 words
0,014
floor 0,013
PM per 1,000 words
0,008
gate 0,013
0,000
infrastructure 0,008
0,019
rebuild 0,005
0,004
roof 0,003
0,016
wall 0,011
0,032
window 0,029
0,000 0,100 0,200 0,300 0,400 0,500
Graph 1. Frequency per 1,000 words of the building metaphors in the GB and PM
corpora.
the PM than in the GB corpus. By contrast, four items: construct, rebuild, wall,
window, were found to be more frequent in the GB corpus. Out of these, two
remaining metaphor vehicles: floor, roof, registered similar frequency values in
the two corpora. Examples that follow show the metaphorical uses of bridge and
architecture in the PM corpus, and construction and rebuild in the GB corpus.
(1) Yes, it is possible to bridge2 the gap between CASE and PM tools using
mapping models as the required bridges. DFD mapping into Gantt–Pert
Diagram, for example, could be regarded as validity and feasibility proof
of this concept. (Gelbard, Pliskin, and Spielger 2002: 462) PM corpus
2. The metaphorically used words and phrases have been highlighted in bold.
(2) The choice of a strategy and architecture for the systems concept should be
based upon the relationship between emergence and integration. (Domb-
kins 2008: 20) PM corpus
(3) Managed funds keep some cash for redemptions – or until managers can
find a place for it. Another reason for the index funds’ strong returns lies in
the construction of portfolios. (Laderman and Smith 1999: 72) GB corpus
(4) That seems like a modest goal, but it just might get the world thinking
seriously about sustainability once again. If the Johannesburg summit helps
rebuild a bit of faith in international environmental co-operation, then it
will have been worthwhile. (Vaitheeswaran 2002: 5) GB corpus
Despite the frequency differences of the building metaphors, the most frequent
item for both corpora is build, even though it was much more frequent in the
PM corpus, 0.405 as compared to 0.251 in the GB corpus. Construct, which
was more frequent in the GB corpus, 0.098 as compared to 0.048 is the second
most frequent item in this corpus and the third most frequent in the PM corpus.
Furthermore, architecture, which is the second most frequent item in the PM
corpus with 0.080 occurrences, is the fourth most common in the GB corpus with
0.019 occurrences. The ranking of the most frequent metaphors in both corpora
is therefore similar, but there is a tendency for more frequent metaphorical uses
in the PM corpus
Graph 2 shows the frequencies per 1,000 words of the journey lexical items
used metaphorically in the GB and the PM corpora.
Like the building source domain, the metaphorical uses of the lexical items in
the journey domain show similarities and differences between the two corpora.
Two lexical items: lane, railway, were not identified as metaphors in either of
the corpora. Five items: highway, rail, train, tunnel, were not used as metaphors
in the PM corpus, but they were found in the GB corpus with low frequencies
ranging from 0.001 to 0.002. Regarding the remaining items, the results in
Graph 2 indicate that all but two: fuel, vehicle, were used far more frequently
with a metaphorical sense in the PM corpus than in the GB corpus. In particular,
map, path, road and track registered significantly higher frequencies in the PM
corpus. Examples 5 and 6 show the metaphorical uses of path and road in the
PM corpus, while example 7 includes fuel with a metaphorical sense in the GB
corpus.
(5) Finding ways to overcome our assumptions and varying from standard
practice puts us on a path to high value breakthroughs. Unfortunately,
we often encounter the greatest resistance when we challenge beliefs and
0,005
derail 0,011
0,034
fuel 0,005
0,002
highway 0,000
0,010
journey 0,024
0,033
map 0,289
0,128
path 0,289
0,001
rail 0,000
0,024
GB per 1,000 words
road 0,048
PM per 1,000 words
0,083
track 0,186
0,011
traffic 0,011
0,002
train 0,000
0,002
tunnel 0,000
0,017
vehicle 0,011
0,000 0,100 0,200 0,300 0,400
Graph 2. Frequency per 1,000 words of the journey metaphors in the GB and PM
corpora.
attempt new approaches (usually from those who assume they already have
the answers). (Stauffer 2008, PM World Today, online edition) PM corpus
(6) So your project flopped, and now you’re convinced you’ll be forever
doomed to has-been status. Fear not. Here are some tips on how to forge
ahead – straight from three project managers who have led failed projects
only to find greater success down the road. (Fretty 2007: 45) PM corpus
(7) The result is that SMEs with better self-selection characteristics falsely
attribute their performance to what they think are the relatively greater
benefits they get from engaging in UVAs. Fueling these misperceptions
may be additional characteristics of the stronger SMEs, such as hubris and
overconfidence based on previous success. (Arend 2006: 760) GB corpus
As with the building source domain, the most frequent journey metaphors are
the same in both corpora. Map and path are the most frequent metaphors but
with more than twice the number of occurrences in the PM corpus as compared
to the GB corpus. Track, the third most frequent metaphor in the PM corpus is
the second of the GB most frequent items analyzed. Here again, the frequencies
registered clearly point to a more widespread use of the journey metaphors in
the PM corpus. The only significant dissimilarity in this sense is related to fuel,
which is the fourth most frequent metaphor vehicle in the GB corpus, and the
least frequent item in the PM corpus.
Finally, Graph 3 shows the frequencies of the metaphorically used lexical
items from the nautical domain.
0,008
anchor 0,021
0,006
boat 0,005
0,014
float 0,207
0,003
shore 0,000 GB per 1,000 words
steer 0,013 PM per 1,000 words

0,064
0,012
storm 0,005
0,053
wave 0,037
0,000 0,100 0,200 0,300
Graph 3. Frequency per 1,000 words of the nautical metaphors in the GB and PM
corpora.
The metaphorical use of the nautical lexical items is similar to the building and
journey metaphors in that most of them were more frequently used in the PM
corpus. Except for one item, shore, which was not used metaphorically in the
PM corpus and was identified as a metaphor on very few occasions in the GB
corpus, most of the nautical metaphors, anchor, float, steer, registered markedly
higher frequencies in the PM corpus. Example 8 shows the metaphorical use
of anchor in the PM corpus. Storm, see example 9, and wave were used more
often in the GB corpus but without a notable difference in the frequency values,
especially for wave, and one metaphor, boat, was used with the same frequency
in both corpora.
(8) Both goals were served by their strategy of estimating top-down with target
costs as an anchor. (Busby and Payne 1999: 289) PM corpus
(9) Still worried about inflation? Perhaps you should consider a new economic
storm gathering in Asia. (Mandel et al. 1997: 54) GB corpus
Despite the differences in the frequencies described, the same three items, but
in a varying order, float, steer, wave in the PM corpus; wave, float, steer in the
GB corpus were the most often used metaphors in both corpora. What is also
worth noting is that float, together with steer and storm registered very similar
frequencies in the GB corpus, and very different ones in the PM corpus.
The frequency data described provide certain evidence to support the hy-
pothesis of this study, even though the results obtained are limited to the lexical
items found in the PM corpus and subsequently analyzed in the GB corpus.
It seems that certain metaphorical conceptualizations specific to a particular
and more specialized subfield of knowledge might be articulated through more
frequent uses of the related linguistic metaphors. In this sense, the building,
journey and nautical metaphors seem to be frequently activated in metaphori-
cal conceptualizations of the project management subfield. The tentative claims
raised in Skorczynska (2010b) with regard to these three domains as possibly
more intensely involved in the construction of the project management field of
knowledge and its discourse seem to be confirmed here. The metaphors related
to these domains were also found in the general business discourse sample but
without being equally prominent. The corpus evidence could, therefore, be in-
terpreted as a vertical metaphor variation from the general to the specialized
level within one field of knowledge. Such a variation may mirror the processes
of specialization on the cognitive level in the sense that on a vertical axis from
the general to the specific, the metaphors at the general base are re-exploited at
the higher level of specification.
7.2. Metaphor vehicle collocates

The corpus analysis of the metaphor vehicles highlighted certain marked dif-
ferences in the frequency values between the GB and the PM corpus. However,
it also revealed that – with a few exceptions – most of the metaphor vehicles
analyzed were found to be used in both corpora and that the metaphor vehicle
ranking (from the most to the least frequent) was similar for the two corpora.
The differences and similarities described suggested that the metaphor vehicles
could be further examined within their individual co-texts, so that other possible
variations related to the words they frequently collocate with would be detected.
To this end, the co-text of the most frequent metaphor vehicles was manually an-
alyzed within the span of five words to the left and right. For all of the metaphor
vehicles shown in Tables 1, 2, and 3 as verbs: build, construct, track and steer,
the percentages given also include the use of the noun forms, so for instance, to
build assets also include building of assets. In the case of construct, two noun
forms are included: construction and construct, as in construction of a variable,
a construct measure, and measurement of a construct. It should be pointed out
here that the focus in this analysis is not so much on grammatical patterns but
on the semantically significant co-occurrence of words.
Table 1. Collocations of build, construct, window and architecture in the GB and PM

corpora.
Metaphor Collocates in Percentage of Collocates in Percentage of

vehicle GB corpus the total PM corpus the total
occurrences occurrences
build model 6% trust 14%
company 5% system 7%
business 4% relationship 6%
empire 3% theory 5%
assets 2% capability 4%
brand 2% model 3%
team 3%
construct variable 11% knowledge 11%

measure 7% theory 11%
model 3% understanding 11%
measurement 2%
window time 14% time 27%

demand 14%
architecture financial 25% system 30%

global 25% modular 23%
organizational 13%
project 10%
Table 1 shows the collocates of the four most frequent metaphor vehicles in the
GB and the PM corpora: build, construct, window, architecture, together with
the percentage of the collocations identified in relation to the total number of
the metaphor vehicle occurrences in each of the corpora. In this way, the most
common collocations for the metaphor vehicles given can be observed.
The four metaphor vehicles shown in Table 1 collocate with different words,
with the exception of build a model and time window, which was found in
both corpora. This reveals distinct cognitive constructs underlying both types
of discourse. In the GB corpus, the focus is on building companies, assets

and brands, in other words on business growth and expansion, example 10 and
11, while in the PM discourse, build tends to co-occur with words describing
interpersonal relations and communication, such as trust, relationship, capability
and team, which are thus viewed as entities that can be progressively and fully
constructed, example 12 and13.
(10) But the performance of a company’s fund managers is only one of the fac-
tors that decides its success, and is ultimately the least reliable on which
to build a business, since the most common determinant of good perfor-
mance is luck. (Barry 1997: 4) GB corpus
(11) The two fashion companies are among a gaggle of Spanish conquistadors
rapidly building global business empires. Many are much bigger than
Mango and Zara, although sometimes less well-known abroad. (“Con-
quistadors on the beach” 2007: 95) GB corpus
(12) You don’t allow people to remain in the dark about what you’re doing. You
address anxieties, problems and challenges. It’s all about building trust
and developing strong communication within groups of human beings.
(Greengard 2008: 60) PM corpus
(13) It utilizes a project as an enabler for building a direct business relation-
ship with the client, which enables to by-pass the contractor in the next
project. Furthermore, building long-term relationships with subcontrac-
tors is seen as an important managerial approach in ensuring the loyalty of
subcontractors in their relationship with the contractor from one project to
another. (Eloranta, Kujala, and Artto 2008: 54) PM corpus
Construct also shows varying collocation patterns. In the GB corpus, vari-
able, example 14, model and measurement are constructed in the context of
economic model analyses, while in the PM corpus words with a more general
sense, such as knowledge, example 15, theory and understanding combine with
construct.
(14) To deal with this issue, this study employed three approaches. (. . . ) The
third one was to build a variable for supplier capability. (Takeishi 2001:
429) GB corpus
(15) Thus, the empirical study accounted for in this paper should be seen as
a rather exploratory study, the purpose of which is to contribute to the
building of knowledge on how and why companies do PPM in certain
ways – and especially to the building of knowledge on the consequences
PPM has for project work. (Blichfeldt Blichfeld and Eskerod 2008: 358)
PM corpus
Architecture is another example of distinct collocations. Financial architecture
and global architecture are more common in the GB corpus, as Table 1 shows,
and seem to tune into more general business topics of this discourse sample. By
contrast, the collocations of architecture in the PM corpus are specialist terms:
system architecture refers to the software applications for project management,
and modular architecture, organizational architecture, as well as project ar-
chitecture are all used in reference to the organization of project management
practices in companies.
The data described herein suggest that there is an interrelation between the
collocations of the most frequent building metaphor vehicles and the topics of
the discourse samples analyzed. It has been shown that most collocates identified
are notably distinct in the two corpora. However, the evidence collected cannot
entirely support the view that the differences in the metaphor vehicle collocations
are significant for the different specialization levels of the discourse samples
examined. Construct, for instance, in the PM corpus formed collocates with a
more general meaning as compared to the GB corpus, where the collocations
listed were used as technical terms, e.g., construct a variable, construct a model,
measure construct, measurement of construct.
The collocates of the journey metaphor vehicles – path, track, map and
road – vary in the GB and the PM corpus, Table 2, like in the case of the building
metaphors. Except for a few common word collocations such as track record,
keep the track of and road map, the remaining ones are clearly distinct. In the PM
corpus, the collocates listed in Table 2 are project management terms: critical
path analysis, critical path method, critical path coefficient and float path. Track
co-occurs with project, time, example 16, and performance to form terms that
make reference to the control processes in project management applications. By
contrast, track, detected in the GB corpus, example 17, is an instance of general
language use.
(16) By tracking time and subsequently learning that the first two phases of
Projects 1 and 2 took 10% of all project time to complete, the projected
length of Project 3 becomes easy to determine. (Finch 2007: 3) PM corpus
(17) Of course, there’s always the old-fashioned way: build up a track record of
revenue and profit gains before taking the plunge into the public markets.
(Cortese and Himelstein 1997: 127) GB corpus
Further differences between the two corpora are seen in the case of map, which
collocated with four words in the PM corpus but with only one in the GB corpus,
Table 2. Collocations of build, construct, window and architecture in the GB and PM

corpora.

path parallel 15% critical 46%
price 10% analysis 17%
career 4% coefficient 11%
equilibrium 4% float 9%
method 6%
track record 17% project 13%

keep 6% record 11%
time 7%
performance 6%
keep 4%
map causal 55% model 13%

road 11%
program 7%
portfolio 6%
road down 29% map 67%

map 6%
all of them, however, being specialist terms. Mapping model, program road
map and portfolio map, example 18, are used in project management research,
while causal maps, example 19, illustrate links between concepts in business
management research.
(18) This information can also help program managers understand how senior
managers utilize the tools to execute the organization’s business strategy.
The strategic tools we discuss below include the portfolio map, program
road map, and complexity assessment. (Martinelli and Waddell 2007: 2)
PM corpus
(19) In the third step, we used existing theoretical frameworks to organize the
107 raw concepts into broad conceptual categories representing environ-
ment and strategy. Generalization of similar concepts using theoretical
frameworks enables researchers to set up a common basis to compare
causal maps across diverse topical contexts (e.g., high and low velocity
industries) . . . (Nadkarni and Barr 2008: 1406) GB corpus
The journey metaphor vehicle collocations provide further evidence for interre-
lations between the specialization level of the discourse samples studied and the
word combinations used. A greater proportion of collocates in the PM corpus
forms specialist terms with the journey metaphor vehicles analyzed.
Table 3. Collocations of float, steer, and wave in the GB and the PM corpora.

float – – total 21%
activity 19%
free 13%
path 10%
steer – – committee 54%

group 21%
project 17%
wave merger 15% third 50%

new 6%
recent 6%
As Table 3 shows, there are no clear collocation patterns for float and steer in
the GB corpus, as they collocate with a wide range of words. By contrast, in
the PM corpus float co-occurs with four words forming specialist terms from
project management research: total float, example 20, free float, activity float,
and path float. Furthermore, steering committee, steering group, example 21,
and steer a project are all closely related to business strategies and decision-
making processes in project management practices.
(20) However, when we examine the relationship between the LF and the EF of
the tasks, we find that they all have eight days difference. This type of float
is called total float. (Sellinger and West 2001: 25) PM corpus
(21) Steering groups are put in place to foster the use of the methods and the
application of the learned project management techniques through man-
agement demand. (Müller and Stawicki, 2008: 69) PM corpus
Wave collocates distinctly in the two corpora. In the GB corpus, merger, new
and recent, examples 22 and 23, all of them general in meaning, were found to
be its most frequent collocates. In the PM corpus, third was detected in third
wave, a term referring to the Information Age. However, this word combination
was only used in one article and thus is not significant for this study.
(22) Many loans will go sour, as Beijing has moved to curb overheated sectors
such as steel, cars and property. If economic growth slows, a new wave of
bad loans will hit. (“A great big banking gamble” 2005: 97) GB corpus
(23) The comparative-statics results reported in part II of the proposition can
explain the significant reduction of hospital capacity that has accompanied
the recent wave of mergers in the hospital market. (Gal-Or 1999: 335)
GB corpus
The evidence for the collocations of the most frequent nautical metaphors reveals
the greatest differences between the GB and the PM corpus in this respect: the
collocations in the PM corpus are specialist terms, which indicates a higher level
of content specialization than the collocations from the GB corpus, which bear
a more general meaning.
On the whole, the data on the metaphor collocation patterns indicate that
there are certain variations in the co-text of the most frequent metaphor vehi-
cles in the two corpora under study. These variations may be related to differ-
ences in the levels of specialization of the discourse samples examined, given
that most of the PM metaphor collocations are instances of terminology from
the specialized sub-field of business management. A higher number of collo-
cates was identified for the project management metaphor vehicles than for
the general business metaphor vehicles, especially in the case of the journey
and nautical source domains. Such evidence suggests greater stability in the
use of certain metaphorical expressions in the specialized discipline of project
management.
8. Concluding remarks
The vertical variation of metaphorical uses that I argued for in the introduction
to this article can be attested by the corpus data discussed with respect to the
linguistic articulation of metaphors in the general business discourse and the
project management discourse. The metaphors involving the source domains
of building, journey and nautical activities, emerge in both types of discourse,
but they are more frequently used in the more specialized discourse. However,
other metaphors from the domains of war, mechanics, animal and human life,
as well as game and sports, which were used in both samples (Skorczynska
2010b) entail more frequent linguistic uses in the general business discourse.The
vertical variation could further be evidenced by the differences and similarities
detected in the co-text of the metaphors studied, which, in the case of project
management discourse, seem to reflect a higher degree of content and knowledge
specialization, as well as greater stability
The data presented here sustain Maasen and Weingart’s (2000) view of
metaphor as a local, adaptable and flexible unit of knowledge which interacts
with discourses and alters them. This can be discerned in the collocation patterns
where the same metaphor vehicle is primed for distinct lexical items in different
corpora and creates different concepts or units of knowledge. This variation pro-
cess, however, is compensated by the stable metaphorical word combinations
used in both types of discourse studied. It was impossible, given the scope of
this analysis, to detect exactly how the different metaphors circulate through
and between both types of discourse, as well as how and when they originate
and become well-established. Such research would provide a more horizontal
focus to the vertical variations described here.
This study also offers insights into metaphor use in project management
discourse, previously discussed by Roman (1986), Angling (1988), Packendorff
(1995) or Eskerod (1996), as well as remediates the lack of corpus evidence
in such approaches. The explicit references to the metaphor of the Chinese
wall (Eskerod 1996) were not found in the samples studied, but a widespread
use of building metaphors can be attested. Nautical and journey metaphors were
never mentioned in the project management literature overviewed, but they were
detected in this corpus study. Game and animal metaphors suggested by Eskerod
(1996) lend themselves to be examined in a corpus study, so that claims raised
in the scholarly literature could be confirmed in linguistic research.
Obviously, the present study has a number of limitations. The corpus search
was limited to the metaphor vehicles identified by hand in the PM corpus, and
a reversed search, that is for all possible metaphor vehicles from the GB corpus
in the PM corpus would be necessary in order to reliably report metaphor varia-
tions. The analysis presented here should also be complemented by the study of
the metaphor context of use to provide a broader view of the metaphor transi-
tions and stabilities of meanings on different levels of knowledge specialization
represented in the discourse samples studied.
Despite the shortcomings mentioned, this study has provided corpus ev-
idence for a new perspective on metaphor use, corresponding to knowledge
specialization processes and related discourse variations. It thus deserves to be
approached systematically and thoroughly in future research. Given that spe-
cialization is a pervasive way forward in furthering business knowledge and
practice, systematic and thorough research along the lines set out in this chapter
cannot but be very promising.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kathleen Ahrens and Ivy Chan Wing Shan (Hong Kong
Baptist University), Debra Westall (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia), Rafael
Lostado (Universidad de Valencia), and the editors of this volume for their
helpful comments and suggestions on the previous versions of this paper.
References
A great big banking gamble
2005 The Economist 377 (8450): 71–73.
Conquistadors on the beach
2007 The Economist 383(8527): 95–98.
Alderman, Neil and Chris Ivory
2007 Partnering in major contracts: Paradox and metaphor. International
Journal of Project Management 25: 386–393.
Alejo, Rafael
2010 Where does the money go? An analysis of the container metaphor in
economics: The market and the economy. Journal of Pragmatics 42
(4): 1137–1150.
Angling, M.
1988 Resource planning and control in multiproject environment. Interna-
tional Journal of Project Management 6 (4): 197–201.
Arend, Richard J.
2006 SME – Supplier alliance activity in manufacturing: contingent benefits
and perceptions.” Strategic Management Journal 27: 741–763.
Barry, B.
1997 Investors, unite. The Economist, 345 (8040): 3–5.
Barry, Daved and Hans Hansen
2008 The Sage Handbook of New Approaches in Management and Organi-
zation. London: Sage.
Black, Max
1962 Models and Metaphors. New York: Ithaca.
Blichfeldt, Stilling B. and Pernille Eskerod
2008 Project portfolio management – There’s more to it than what man-
agement enacts. International Journal of Project Management 26 (4):
357–365.
Boers, Frank and Murielle Demecheleer
1997 A few metaphorical models in (Western) economic discourse. In Dis-
course and Perspective in Cognitive Linguistics, W.A. Liebert, G. Re-
deker, and L. Waugh (eds.), 115–129. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.
Boers, Frank
1999 When a bodily source domain becomes prominent. The joy of counting
Linguistics, Raymond Gibbs, and Gerard Steen (eds.), 47–56. Ams-
terdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Boyd, Richard
1993 Metaphor and theory change: what is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for? In
Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony (ed.), 481–533. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Busby, J.S. and K. Payne
1999 Issues of organisational behaviour in effort estimation for development
projects. International Journal of Project Management 17 (5): 293–
300
Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Timothy Ennis
2001 A comparative study of metaphor in Spanish and English financial
reporting. English for Specific Purposes 20: 249–266.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Andreas Musolff
2003 Battered ‘hero’or ‘innocent victim’? A comparative study of metaphor
for euro trading in British and German financial reporting. English for
Specific Purposes 22: 153–176.
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Houndmills,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clark, Timothy, François Cooren, Joep Cornelissen and Timothy Kuhn (eds.)
2008 Special issue on New Directions on Organizational Communication
Research. Organization Studies 29 (6).
Cortese, A. and L. Himelstein
1997 How IPOs turn pip-squeaks into players. Business Week 3540: 124–
130.
Dombkins, D.H.
2008 The Integration of Project Management and Systems Thinking. Project
Perspectives 29: 16–21.
Eloranta, K., J. Kujala and K. Artto
2008 Managing risk in subcontractors’ business relationships with client
and competitors. Project Perspectives 29: 52–56.
Eskerod, Pernille
1996 Meaning and action in a multi-project environment. International
Journal of Project Management 14 (2): 61–65.
Eubanks, Philip
1999 Conceptual metaphor as rhetorical response. A reconsideration of
metaphor. Written Communication 16: 171–199.
Finch, C.
2007 Key performance indicators for consultancies: How to use per-project
labor cost data to analyze KPIs for your consulting company.
PM World Today, 9(3): 1–4. [http://www.pmforum.org/library/tips/
2007/PDFs/Finch-3-07.pdf] (04/23/2010)
Fretty, P.
2007 The After Life. PM Network 21 (8): 41–45.
Gal-Or, Esther
1999 Mergers and Exclusionary Practices in Health Care Markets. Journal
of Economics and Management Strategy 8 (3): 315–350.
Gelbard, Roy, Nava Pliskin and Israel Spielger
2002 Integrating system analysis and project management tools. Interna-
tional Journal of Project Management 20 (6): 461–468.
Grant, David and Cliff Oswick
1996 Metaphor and Organizations. London: Sage.
Greengard, S.
2008 Lessons into Leadership. PM Network 22 (8): 59–60.
Henderson, Willie
1994 Metaphor and economics. In New Directions in Economic Methodol-
ogy, Roger E. Backhouse (ed.), 343–367. London: Routledge.
Henderson, Willie
1998 Metaphor. In The Handbook of Economic Methodology, Davis, J.B.,
D.W. Hands, and U. Mäki (eds.), 289–294. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Henderson, Willie
2000 Metaphor, economics and ESP: some comments. English for Specific
Purposes 19: 167–173.
Herrera, Honesto and Michael White
2000 Business is war or how takeovers are narrated in the press. In Panorama
actual de la lingüı́stica aplicada. Conocimiento, pensamiento y uso
del lenguaje. Tomo I, Fornés M., J.M. Molina, and L. Pérez (eds.),
231–40. Universidad de la Rioja: AESLA.
Knudsen, Susanne
2003 Scientific metaphors going public. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (8): 1247–
1263.
Koller, Veronika
2004a Businesswomen and war metaphor: ‘Possessive, jealous and pugna-
cious’? Journal of Sociolinguistics 8 (1): 3–22.
Koller, Veronika
2004b Metaphor and gender in business media discourse:A critical cognitive
study. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koller, Veronika
2005 Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from busi-
ness media discourse. Discourse & Society 16 (2): 1999–224.
Koller, Veronika
2008 Brothers in arms: Contradictory metaphors in contemporary market-
ing discourse. In Confronting Metaphor in Use: An appplied linguistic
approach, Mara Sophia Zanotto, Lynne Cameron, and Marilda C. Cav-
alcanti (eds.), 103–126. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Koskinen, Kaj U., Pekka Pihlanto and Hannu Vanharanta
2003 Tacit knowledge acquisition and sharing in a project work context.
International Journal of Project Management 21: 281–290.
Kuhn, Thomas S.
1979 Metaphor in science. In Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony (ed.),
533–542. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laderman, J.M. and M. Smith
1999 The Best Mutual Funds. Business Week 3614: 72.
Maasen, Sabine and Peter Weingart
2000 Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Mandel, M.J., P. Engardio, E. Thornton and Ch. Farrell
1997 The threat of inflation. Business Week 3552: 54–59.
Martinelli, R. and J. Waddell
2007 Managing Programs to Success: Key Program Management Tools.
PM World Today, 9(6): 1–3. [http://www.pmworldtoday.net/featured
papers/2007/june.htm#2] (04/23/2010)
Morgan, Gareth
1986 Images of Organization. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Müller, R. and J. Stawicki
2008 How do organizations develop from process orientation towards a
project-oriented company? A Framework for Building Successful
Project-Based Organizations. Project Perspectives 29: 68–71.
Nadkarni, Sucheta and Pamela S. Barr
2008 Environmental context, managerial cognition, and strategic action: An
integrated view. Strategic Management Journal 29 (13): 1395–1427.
Oswick, Cliff, Tom Keenoy and David Grant
2002 Metaphor and analogical reasoning in organization theory: Beyond
orthodoxy. The Academy of Management Review 27 (2): 294–303.
Packendorff, Johann
1995 Inquiring into the temporary organization: new directions for project
management research. Scandinavian Journal of Management 11 (4):
319–333.
PMI Standards Committee
1987 A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. Upper Darby,
PA: Project Management Institute (PMI).
Roman, Daniel D.
1986 Managing Projects:A Systems Approach. NewYork: Elsevier Science.
Scott, Michael
1997 WordSmith Tools, version 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sellinger, Craig and Jimmie L. West

2001 Comparison between hardware system timing and project manage-
ment critical path analysis methodologies. Project Management Jour-
nal 32 (1): 20–27.
Skorczynska, Hanna and Alice Deignan
2006 Readership and purpose in the choice of economics metaphors. Meta-
phor and Symbol 2 (2): 87–104.
Skorczynska, Hanna, and Jordi Piqué
2005 A corpus-based description of metaphorical marking patterns in sci-
entific and popular business discourse. Metaphorik.de 9: 112–129.
Skorczynska, Hanna
2001 Metaphor in scientific business journals and business periodicals: an
example of scientific discourse popularization. Ibérica 3: 43–60.
Skorczynska, Hanna
2010a Metaphor marking and metaphor typological and functional ranges in
business periodicals. In Researching and Applying Metaphor in the
Real World, Graham Low, Zazzie Todd, Alice Deignan, and Lynne
Cameron (eds.), 309–320. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Skorczynska, Hanna
2010b Metaphor use and discourse specialization: the case of general busi-
ness and project management discourse. A preliminary study. In Ways
and Modes of Human Communication, Rosario Caballero Rodriguez,
and Marı́a Jesús Pinar Sanz (eds.), 859–868. Cuenca: Ediciones de la
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.
Smith, Geoff P.
1995 How high can a dead cat bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock
Market. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 18:
43–57.
Söderlund, Jonas
2004 Building theories of project management: past research, questions for
the future. International Journal of Project Management 22: 183–191.
Stauffer, D.
2008 The other key question. PM World Today 10(6):
[http://www.pmworldtoday.net/viewpoint/2008/jun.htm#3] (09/30/10)
Takeishi, Akira
2001 Bridging inter- and intra-firm boundaries: management of supplier
involvement in automobile product development. Strategic Manage-
ment Journal 22 (5): 403–433.
Vaitheeswaran, V.
2002 The great race. The Economist 364 (8280): 3–5.
White, Michael
1997 The use of metaphor in reporting financial market transactions.
Cuadernos de Filologı́a Inglesa 6: 233–245.
White, Michael
2003 Metaphor and economics: the case of growth. English for Specific
Purposes 22: 131–151.
Whitty, Stephen Jonathan
2005 A memetic paradigm of project management. International Journal
of Project Management 23: 575–583.
Zanotto, Mara Sophia, Lynne Cameron and Marilda C. Cavalcanti
2008 Applied linguistic approaches to metaphor. In Confronting Metaphor
in Use: An appplied linguistic approach, Mara Sophia Zanotto, Lynne
Cameron, and Marilda C. Cavalcanti (eds.), 1–8.Amsterdam/Philadel-
phia: John Benjamins.
Metaphor as an instrument of linguistic and social
identity co-construction in business development
networks (BDNs)
Hana Blazkova
Abstract
Drawing on the first substantial dataset of audio-recorded business networking speeches,

this chapter offers a perspective on metaphor use in business development networks
(BDNs), an emergent institutional environment that increasingly attracts participation
from small business owners. The chapter addresses metaphor development through in-
teraction, and makes an expressed connection to the evolution of a particular group
identity.
1. Introduction
This chapter focuses on metaphor in the 60-second rhetoric of Business De-

velopment Networks (BDNs) and targets metaphor use as a positioning device
and as a shorthand way of displaying aspects of professional and group iden-
tities. The analysis relies primarily on a particular case study, and examines
a series of 12 business networking speeches delivered in close succession, all
of which incorporated an Olympic sports metaphor. In the linguistic and cog-
nitive domains, the chapter explores metaphor appropriation processes within
the BDN scenario, isolating the dominant tendencies and micro-factors that
appear to contribute to the process of metaphor co-construction. On a differ-
ent plane, it debates the potential existence of an interrelationship between
metaphor development through interaction and the evolution of prototypical
group identity. Self-categorisation theory was a platform from which identity
processes were described, Cameron’s (2007, 2008) conception of dynamical sys-
tems approach and the current discourse-analytical turn in metaphor research
(Steen 2011a, b) served as the key points of departure for linguistic analy-
ses and the claims concerning linguistic, cognitive and social dimensions of
metaphor.
292 Hana Blazkova
The chapter is structured as follows: it first opens with the necessary backdrop
on the BDN as a community of practice and on the BDN 60-second rhetoric.
Second, a concrete dataset underlying this study and the methodology moti-
vating the scope and direction of linguistic analysis are introduced. This part
introduces the BDN Olympic case and presents an overview of the transcripts
that are germane to the ensuing discussion, along with a set of initial observa-
tions on the communicative outcomes of the BDN metaphors in use. The next
section turns to an initial analysis, unpacking the notion of individual metaphor
evolution (appropriation/co-construction) processes and attending first to the
local dynamics of metaphor appropriation evidenced in the BDN Olympic case.
The analysis then moves beyond the micro-level, tracing the dominant groups
of systematic metaphors in the sample and discussing their dynamic interrela-
tionship with the fluid definition of prototypical group identity. Finally, the most
salient influences motivating metaphor co-construction in the BDN context are
identified.
2. BDN as an emergent community of practice
In Anglo-Saxon economies and in most countries of Western Europe, the past

decade has been marked by a paradigm shift in respect to the structure of business
activity. Small businesses are departing from primary employment in manufac-
turing industry and are increasingly embracing the service sector (Brauer and
Miller, 2008; Reehar 2010 inter alia). This trend has led to increased competi-
tion between these service providers since they offer relatively undifferentiated
services within their sectors, with many providing mainstream IT solutions or
financial and legal advice. It is therefore becoming more difficult for new en-
trants within the service segment to attract substantial business. Indeed, the
5-year survival rate for UK businesses born in 2004 and still active in 2009 was
46.8% (Office for National Statistics 2010). Similar figures on business survival
rates have been published by the National Statistical Institutes in the countries
of the Eurozone and the U.S. (2009). While the figures for 2009 were arguably
influenced by the 2007–2010 financial crisis, the U.S. data for the year 2000 still
indicate a 5-year survival rate between 44 and 57%, depending on the industry or
service sector (Shane 2010). The proportion of unsuccessful start-ups is there-
fore substantial and there are a number of reasons for the lack of success. Since
word of mouth and personal networks have traditionally been the most produc-
tive source of new business for small businesses (Litvin, Goldsmith and Pan
2007), it is presumed that the absence of a robust partner network contributes
to the failure rate. With changes in the economic environment and society, the
Metaphor as an instrument of linguistic and social identity co-construction 293
nature of networking has also evolved beyond the simple reliance on personal
networks (Carl 2008).
Since small businesses tend to systematically seek partnerships and form
strategic alliances with other businesses in the area, they have strongly con-
tributed to the emergence of business development networks (BDNs)1 : coali-
tions of business owners and professionals who, through a structured support
system, help each other to generate business. BDNs proliferate, mostly then in
Anglo-Saxon economies, attracting large numbers of small business owners and
forming a distinct community of practice with a distinct rhetoric. The research
underlying this chapter draws on the data recorded between 2005 and 2007 in
the meetings of four BDN groups in Birmingham in the U.K. These were part
of the leading company in the BDN trade, a networking franchise which within
the last two decades has managed to pioneer the idea of organized networking.
This franchise has spread into 55 countries, attracting hundreds of thousands of
members along the way and generating close to 3 billion USD worth of business
for its members in 2009 (BNI 2010). These members are organized into local
reference groups of approximately 30 businesspeople who meet on a weekly
basis. In order to eliminate internal competition and maximize the benefits for
the members, the code of practice allows one member per profession within a
single group. The underlying principle is that of reciprocity: members provide
leads to new business to their fellow members with the hope of benefiting their
business in the process.
3. BDN rhetoric with limits of a single minute and BDN metaphor
It is initially difficult for new members to communicate their expertise and build
sufficient rapport with the group, one of the central resources at their disposal
is the 60-second weekly speech, conducted in a fairly unchanging and con-
trolled environment in which speakers compete for attention with some 20–30
other marketing messages. BDN 60-seconds could be defined as a loose equiv-
alent of an elevator pitch that needs to be changed and updated on a weekly
basis. Its generic structure tends to follow a format entailing a personal in-
troduction, positioning of the speaker’s business vis-a-vis competition, specific
service offer and target clientele identification and a memorable close. Example
1 below provides an exemplar. It is important to note that while the generic struc-
1. The term BDN was initially coined by Ivan Misner, a CEO of a leading BDN or-
ganization in the US, (Misner, 1993), and has since been used in his publications
and a handful of marketing and consumer behavior studies that have targeted the
phenomenon.
294 Hana Blazkova
ture remains relatively fixed (introduction/positioning/specific service/target

clientele/memorable close), the actual realization of the BDN 60-sec is diverse,
as are the strategies enlisted in the process.
Table 1. Example 1. Prototypical 60-second speech.
Generic structure Transcript

Introduction Good morning everybody. Morning, my name’s Paul Duke
Thomas, I am very fortunate to work for a company called
Duke’s Print based in the heart of city.
Initial positioning We can make you look good on paper.
Specific service And we’ve recently been doing a lot of pads.
for the week We can do A5 pads, A4 pads, A3 pads, A2 pads, we can’t
do A8 pads, but I’ve got an A8 outside so I don’t care.
(laughter and cheering)
Nobody throws away pads, they always use them.
They keep them on their desk, they use them to write
phone numbers on.
Target clientele So if you know anybody who uses pads, go and see them.
Go and see them and talk about the pad.
It won’t make them mad, it won’t make them sad.
I’ll go and see them and I’ll make them glad.
Memorable close Because I can make them look good between the sheets.
The body of the presentation is organized in an intriguingly poetic manner, in-

volving a number of syntactic aspects such as parallelism, morpho-grammatical
aspects, and phonetic aspects such as rhyme. These are good examples of com-
monly deployed strategies that mark the BDN speeches. The presentation also
illustrates the frequent reliance on metaphor; in this case, the printer opened his
presentation with an inconspicuous metaphorical line: we can make you look
good on paper. He then deployed an extended variation on the theme in his
memorable close: because I can make them look good between the sheets, thus
introducing a sense of gradation and an element of playful and memorable am-
biguity. Metaphor within the BDN scenario serves a number of communicative
functions. It is used to position and differentiate an individual and their busi-
ness, to evaluate self/competitors, to communicate values espoused or rejected
and/or as an involvement strategy increasing the message retention. Ultimately,
metaphor also participates in the construction of a variety of social and profes-
sional identities.
4. Background to the BDN Olympic case: The dataset and methodology
4.1. The dataset

This part introduces in detail the case study that is at the heart of this chap-
ter’s analysis. It first provides a detailed account of the dataset, including ethno-
graphic information needed to establish the full context. Second, I make a note on
methodology in regard to metaphor identification and analysis. Third, I present
an overview of abridged transcripts of all BDN Olympic speeches which aims
at helping to contextualize individual speeches that are later analysed in detail,
and I make a few initial observations on the transcripts. This section opens with
an extract from my interview with one of the BDN members who managed
to succinctly convey the general difficulty arising from the repetitiveness of a
60-sec slot. The Olympic task underlying the case study outlined below was a
temporary remedy to the ‘stereotype ailment’, somewhat reviving the waning
group dynamics.
I try to listen to what people have to say in their 60 seconds. But at the same
time I’m often kind of rehearsing my own speech. I’ve been in this chapter [BDN
group] for quite a while and know the people. And you know how it all becomes
repetitive, you know, after all you’re listening to the same people talking about
the same business a week after week. And well, you sometimes switch off or end
up focusing just on the bit where they ask for the referrals.
The dataset which the underlying study draws upon consists of more than 30
hours of business networking meetings, namely the participants’ networking
presentations, recorded between 2005 and 2007 in four BDN groups in Birm-
ingham. These were the first BDN meetings to be captured for discourse analytic
research. The key data supporting this chapter were recorded in September 2005
in a single meeting of the core group, and the use of metaphor was solicited by
the chair of the group. The meeting was held shortly after London beat Paris in
winning the right to stage the Olympic Games in 2012. On this occasion, the
group chair explicitly asked the group members to deploy an Olympic sports
reference, suggesting that they may want to construct their business identity by
incorporating a reference to an Olympic sport into their speeches: if you want
to liken yourself to an Olympic sport. . . (Example 2 below).
While the chair encourages relatively open use of Olympic sports reference,
all members eventually deployed an Olympic sports metaphor, in the majority
of cases using a direct comparison to their own business. In both his challenge
to the crowd and in an unstructured interview following the meeting, the chair
said that his main motivation for having introduced the Olympic metaphor task
was to boost the group dynamics and spontaneity of otherwise pre-prepared
296 Hana Blazkova
Table 2. Example 2. BDN chair explicitly asking the members to use Olympic sports
metaphor.
Speaker Transcript
Chair Now just to make it a bit – I suppose just to keep you all
awake as well this morning, I wanna give you a challenge
for the sixty second slot this morning. 2012. What’s 2012,
what’s happening in 2012?
Member Olympics!
Chair Yeah, there you go, the Olympics. Olympic sports. What I
want you to do, in your sixty-second slot, I just want you
to introduce anyhow you want, make it as cryptic or as ob-
vious as you want, I just want you to introduce an Olympic
sport into your s-sixty-second slot, Yeah? You think that’s
uh: easy?
Member = Yeah! =
Chair = just use any sport =
Member = Liken yourself to an Olympic sport?
Chair If you want to – uh liken yourself to an Olympic sport,
or just use a word that will make sure that people will be
focused, well what is the Olympic sport that they’ve in-
troduced into their sixty-second slot? Okay? Now every-
one’s thinking, oh please don’t start with me! (laughter M)
Please don’t start with me. Give me time to think about it.
speeches, thus increasing the general energy and encouraging an element of

healthy competition.
4.2. Participants
A total of 23 members participated in the meeting, 19 men and 4 women. The
group was ethnically and culturally homogenous; the speakers were all white
British, with the exception of one male of Asian origin (Mal; Speaker 8 in Ta-
ble 3). The first 12 speeches were recorded and transcribed, resulting in 8 male
and 4 female speakers transcribed (female speakers: 2,4,10 and 11 in Table 1
below). The ethnographic data that further inform this chapter involve on-site
ethnographic observation (including observing the spontaneous evaluation of
individual presentations through laughter, comment and applause), a short un-
structured interview with 4 of the members and an online survey.
4.3. Procedure
Throughout the chapter, I have relied on the following methodology in respect to
metaphor analysis. Metaphor identification was unilateral; I initially identified
all linguistic metaphor, following a modified version of the Metaphor Identifi-
cation Procedure (MIP) published by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). In addition
to linguistic metaphor identified by MIP, the source terms in similes [A is like
B], hybrid and prototypical metaphors such as [A would be B/ A is B] were
also tagged. Metaphors in the sample that were linguistically realized as similes
or prototypical metaphor structures largely overlap with the core conceptual
metaphors. Conceptual metaphors underlying individual linguistic metaphors
were in most cases explicitly communicated by the speakers, with the speaker
first identifying the source domain and then following it with a metaphorical
explication using conventional metaphors from the same conceptual domain:
e.g. “maybe it [my business] would be archery [archery] because. . . we. . . hit
the target for our clients . . . hit the bull’s-eye every time we think beyond print
and we deliver beyond expectation!”
Systematic metaphors that connect the local level of metaphor use to the
discourse level were identified following the method proposed in Cameron
(2007:205). Individual metaphors were categorized by the basic meaning of
the source term, thus the phrase however high you raise the bar, we’ll always get
over it was grouped with other metaphorical phrases relating to overcoming
limitations. Systematic metaphors were then identified by bringing together
the source terms in one category and choosing an appropriate label. The source
domain categorisation is an interpretive process motivated mostly by induc-
tion; it is bottom-up analysis with systematic metaphor emerging from the data
(Cameron 2007). In the analytical stage, only the instances perceived as the
deliberate use of metaphor were analysed, i.e. usage that appears to have been
triggered either by the Olympic task itself or that seems to have been inspired
by previous speakers, even though it does not necessarily possess a direct con-
ceptual or semantic link to Olympic sports. I contend that the situational context
in which all the participants were explicitly asked to produce an Olympic ref-
erence/metaphor (if you want to liken yourself to an Olympic sport) makes it
increasingly likely that the sports metaphor employed in the speeches is deliber-
ate, regardless of its conventionality or lexical form (Steen 2011a, 2008). That
the challenge was taken up by all the speakers is evidenced by Table 1 below,
which contains abridged transcripts of individual speeches. It is neither within
the remit of this chapter to direct the analysis at highly conventionalised, non-
deliberate metaphor in the Olympic sample nor is such an analysis perceived as
adding value to the research foci of this study.
298 Hana Blazkova
4.4. The case study

Table 3 below provides a complex overview of BDN Olympic metaphorical
activity. It classifies individual metaphors based on the dominant aspects of
the professional identity (PI) expressed via the sports metaphor, whether it be
competence, goodwill or trustworthiness. The three categories are based on the
conceptualisation of professional identity articulated in Blazkova (2011)2 , and
these categories are given in column 1.At a certain level, these may be interpreted
as very general systematic metaphors, as supercategories to the more specific
systematic metaphors. The systematic metaphors that correspond to and connect
individual linguistic metaphors in the Olympic speeches are given in column 2.
Column 3 informs on the sequence in which the presentations were delivered;
column 4 provides their abridged transcripts, containing linguistic metaphors
that were used in the speeches. Column 5 relates the nature of the business
activity that was aligned with the given sport.
Both the professional identity (PI) supercategory and the precise categories
of systematic metaphors were difficult to delineate. No clear-cut boundaries re-
ally exist and some of the metaphors fit into more than one category. Cameron
forewarns researchers adopting her framework that this will happen, suggesting
that the best approach under the circumstances is that of “a principled flexi-
bility to the grouping of linguistic metaphors” (2007:206). She maintains the
impossibility of devising a discrete set of categories into which each metaphor
could be reliably placed, and concludes that “there may be nesting of groups
within groups. Some metaphors may fit into more than one group, reflecting the
indeterminacy of human meaning making” (Cameron 2007:206). The categori-
sation is indeed inherently contestable, as it is in essence a result of an individual
interpretive process that works recursively between data and categories. I de-
cided to test and review the categorisation in a survey of 22 respondents, 6 of
whom were recruited from the BDN members and 16 from the academics at the
Department of English at the University of Birmingham. The survey resulted
in 95 % agreement with the labelling of individual systematic metaphors, and
thus the categorisation has been retained.
2. The conceptualization of professional identity in Blazkova (2011) assumes equiva-

lence between the conception of source credibility and professional identity.
Table 3. Generic overview of dominant systematic metaphors and corresponding lin-

guistic metaphors in abridged transcripts.
pi aspect systematic olympic sports metaphor: business
metaphor abridged transcript docu- activity
menting core mappings
competence Outstanding 1 if I was to liken myself to an Printing
performance Olympic sport maybe it’d be
(precision) archery/ because. . . we. . . hit the
target for our clients . . . hit the
bull’s-eye every time we think be-
yond print and we deliver beyond
expectation!
3 we’re skilled in the art of vi- Signs design
sual communication so the near-
est sport to us in the Olympics
would be the synchronized swim-
mers. And that’s why sign makers
sit down like this (sits down hold-
ing his nose- visual metaphor)
4 Olympic sport, I would have prob- Restoring
ably said javelin thrower/ because pictures
we start off with nothing, we aim
high, and we always make the
mark!
5 maybe Interactive Control would Software
also be a javelin thrower/ because solutions
we’re straight to the point. . . also
we’ll aim for the sky and go that
extra mile.
10 so if you’re looking for staff that Recruitment
don’t sink but swim give me a call
at Hart. (laughter L)
Overcoming 6 Olympic sport, I was think- Financial
limitations ing about steeple the steeple advisor
jump/steeple chase/. . . the reason
why is, life’s not a sprint but I do
like to get my leg over once in a
while.
9 Olympic sport would be pole Event
vault/. . . because however high organizer
you raise the bar, we’ll always get
over it.
300 Hana Blazkova
pi aspect systematic olympic sports metaphor: business
metaphor abridged transcript docu- activity
menting core mappings
11 if you know anyone interested in Chartered
looking at that sort of thing, we accountant
guarantee we will help them over
the hurdles that they face.
12 I was recently working with a high NLP trainer
jumper, because. . . they had set
the bar, I think it was at 2 me-
tres 42, and that was their abso-
lute limit. They just could not get
any higher than that. . . that was a
limiting belief. 2 metres 42 was as
far as they could possibly jump. . .
and working with them I managed
to get them to meet, to increase
that height in their following prac-
tice to 2 metres 46. . .
Speed/ease 2 we’re all going to be there to help Solicitor
each other and it’s gonna be like a
sprint
Strength 8 we’re worldwide. We’re strong. So Internet
we relate ourselves to the power solutions
lifting team
goodwill Helping 2 It can feel like a marathon since Solicitor
others occasionally you can’t see the fin-
perform ish line. . . I can promise you it’s
better gonna be like a relay race. . . we’re
all going to be there to help each
other and it’s gonna be like a
sprint.
11 help them over the hurdles that Chartered
they face /see above – overcom- accountant
ing obstacles
12 high jumper/see above – over- Life coach
coming obstacles
trust- Stability 7 we’re a bit like the ten thou- Telecom
worthiness sand metres [. . . ] a-as a company. service
We’ve been round for ten years. . . provision
tend to stay with our customers for
a long time
Based on the overview presented in Table 3, a few initial observations may be

made:
[1] The connection between the sport and the business is arbitrary. While
the speakers were invited to compare their business to sports, there is no direct
correspondence between the given sport and the specific nature of the business.
For example, speaker 5, whose profession is the provision of software solu-
tions, uses the javelin thrower metaphor: because we’re straight to the point. . .
also we’ll aim for the sky and go that extra mile, thus delivering a universal
performance metaphor. The lack of a specific link between the business and
the positioning metaphor is rather uncharacteristic of the wider BDN dataset,
where these metaphors are often designed to embody the nature of the business.
This tends to be achieved via the use of topic-driven metaphor (Semino 2008
in Steen 2011b); a metaphor that can be perceived as having both literal and
metaphorical meaning. A good example of topic-driven metaphor is provided
in a memory hook devised and used by a representative of a funeral service: we
are the last one to let you down; an alternative is the following close used by a
Birmingham printer: I can make you look good between the sheets. In the BDN
Olympics, none of the speakers makes such connection. Instead of possessing an
explicit link to the given business, the BDN Olympic metaphors invite mappings
projecting core aspects of the speakers’ professional identities. The absence of
an expressed connection to the nature of the business can be partly explained by
the limits of referring to a single source domain and the time constraints in the
metaphor production, the fact that the speakers were producing the positioning
metaphor virtually on their feet.
[2] All key aspects of professional identity are salient; competence appears
to be a shared attribute. Speakers will typically portray themselves as compe-
tent in their professional field; they display goodwill towards their customers
and clients, and communicate their reliability and consistency in following the
principles of ethical behaviour towards their business partners and clients. Thus
all three PI dimensions are salient, yet it appears that competence tends to be
the dominant identity element communicated via the sports metaphor, with 11
instances of metaphor use that to a degree display this PI dimension. perfor-
mance, precision, overcoming limitations, and speed/ease belong amongst
systematic metaphors that clearly communicated competence. Metaphor is a
multi-level instrument with the potential to invoke multiple identity aspects.
Thus both goodwill and competence were portrayed through 3 metaphors, with
goodwill being the main identity aspect and competence playing an ancillary
role. Trustworthiness was the key identity outcome in a single instance. It is
tempting to suggest that competence appears to be a shared attribute, a common
denominator connecting the majority of the BDN positioning metaphors, yet a
302 Hana Blazkova
larger dataset that is fully representative of the BDN would have to be analysed so
that this conclusion can be fully justified. Professional identity (PI) display may
not necessarily be the key reason for framing individual presentations largely
in competence terms. One factor that may potentially skew the picture is that
the majority of sports are by definition competence-based, and performance
may be seen as the main meaning focus of sports domain in general. At the
same time, it is also important to take into account metaphor co-construction
tendencies.
[3] Metaphor co-construction tendencies: in interactional situations where
metaphor is not pre-prepared, speakers tend to influence one another.The speak-
ers can be momentarily primed to favour a previously used metaphor. Metaphor
is largely fluid and responds to dynamic changes in interaction. Larger sys-
tematic metaphors that connect the utterance level with the macro-level of the
discourse event may constrain the participants’ thinking, thus effectively eras-
ing other possibilities of metaphorizing an idea (Cameron 2007; Gibbs and
Cameron 2008). This factor appears to exert a considerable pull in the BDN
Olympic scenario, the sequence 6, 9, 11, 12 in Table 3 above provides a use-
ful illustration of the recurring reliance on a single systematic metaphor. The
appropriation/co-construction tendency, its key drivers and related social iden-
tity outcomes are the core focus of this chapter and are discussed in detail in the
following sections.
5. The local dynamics of BDN metaphor co-construction and

discussion of selected co-construction processes
Complexities of metaphoric language use (i.e. how people coordinate with each
other through metaphor) emerge from self-organizational processes that operate
along a range of different timescales, from the millisecond to the evolutionary,
and across a range of scales of social group size, from individual and dyad to the
speech community (Gibbs and Cameron 2008:65)
This study departs from a model that understands discourse as inherently re-
ciprocal and dynamic. Discourse, including the bdn presentations, is perceived
as a dialogic activity in which each participant is constantly being influenced
by others; and a dynamic activity with a two-directional chain of causality in
which the local dynamics shape the macro-dynamics of the talk, and vice versa
(Bakhtin 1986, Tannen [1989] 2007; Cameron 2007; Gibbs and Cameron 2008;
Blazkova 2011). This section centres on the local processes that give rise to the
larger emergent patterns, and it sets out to illustrate the most common exam-
ples of metaphor appropriation and co-construction. After its first use metaphor
can be either simply repeated, further developed or dropped (Steen [1992] 1994;
Littlemore and Low 2006; Cameron 2007, 2008) depending primarily on its pre-
vious resonance with the audience. The co-construction tendencies witnessed
in the BDN scenario included metaphor repetition, metaphor redeployment –
the use of metaphor involving deployment of a previously used source domain
term to a new target domain – and other instances of adaption and extension of
one of the previously introduced metaphors (relexicalization, explication and
contrast). While the terminology in use (Steen [1992] 1994; Cameron, 2007)
denotes both intra- and inter-speaker processes, this study focuses mostly on the
inter-speaker dynamics of metaphor co-construction.
5.1. BDN echo metaphor motivated by creativity crisis: Metaphor repetition,

explication and relexicalization as the dominant co-construction
processes
Example 3 is a transcript of two speeches delivered in immediate succession and
gives not just an example of metaphor repetition, but illustrates a case in which
co-construction goes beyond the simple appropriation of the core metaphor
and involves also the incorporation of dominant syntactic and lexico-syntactic
features (labelled here as echo metaphor). The alignment of the two speeches
helps to illustrate the parallel structures of the two extended metaphors, and
highlights the extent to which the original was mirrored in its sequence.
Table 4. Example 3. Echo metaphor/mirror structures.
Una (4)3 Mark (5)

I would have probably said a javelin ic would also be a javelin thrower?
thrower?
Because we start off with a what? Because we’re straight to the point.
We start off with nothing. We’re honest and we tell people what we
think and also
We aim high we aim for the sky
And we always make the mark and go that extra mile
The first of the two speeches was delivered by a female owner of a desktop pub-
lishing business and a long-standing member. She first delivered a conventional
60-second and followed it with the Olympic metaphor. The implicit patterning
of this metaphor follows the explication structure, typical for the BDN Olympic
3. Note the speaker coding, the number next to the speaker’s name labels their position
in the sequence of 12 speeches.
304 Hana Blazkova
sample: first a core metaphor is delivered often in the form of a simile or a

hybrid would be structure, and it is then followed by metaphor explication,
with because as its dominant discourse marker. Una’s metaphor is organized
in a symmetrical pattern based on equivalence (see Hymes 1996, 2003), here
involving predominantly parallelism in the grammatical structure. Topic or-
ganization and the speaking position here is the exclusive we (Una and her
business); the line structure is organized in the pattern: because we/we/we/and
we. The speech that follows Una’s was delivered by a male IT consultant who
was at the time a long-standing member. In his speech, he makes two previous
attempts at delivering an Olympic metaphor, the first is a failed attempt, the
second is a joking reference to his robust build: I can see Paul thinking “sumo”,
“judo”, he then discards the sumo/judo metaphor: no, no, no, no, no. No, I would
agree with Una that maybe IC would also be a javelin thrower. Here, he repeats
Una’s core metaphor, and the peripheral metaphoric expression: we aim high
is re-lexicalized in we aim for the sky (re-lexicalization denotes the use of a
semantically close term).
The speaking position (the use of personal deixis) is shared. Mark also appro-
priates the implicit patterning of the explication, following the same ethnopoetic
organization: because we/we/we/we/and-. This case clearly highlights the con-
vergence tendencies and the importance of paying attention to both the metaphor
and its implicit linguistic patterning. In the case of narratives, the metric that
can be distinguished is not only linguistic but also semantic (see Hymes 1996,
2003; Blommaert 2006). I contend that the same applies to extended metaphors,
and that it is also the structuring patterns that create meaning and tend to be ap-
propriated along with the metaphor, though usually not to the degree evidenced
in this case.
The extent of appropriation displayed here was rather exceptional and crossed
an unspoken boundary, which is clear from both the instant protest of the au-
dience: you copied what she said!, and Mark’s defensive response: well, yeah,
different words, different words. Mark’s echo metaphor appears to be largely
motivated by a creativity crisis: he seems to have exhausted his creative energy
on the two previous metaphors (the failed attempt and the joking reference)
and what could be termed a recency/ time proximity effect: the time proximity
between the two speeches primed Mark to use the javelin thrower metaphor
and its extension. While these appear to be the key appropriation motivators,
the javelin thrower metaphor still works to position Mark’s business and func-
tions as a formal display of his professional identity, as he would not deploy a
metaphor that would be incongruent with his own perspective and an identity
he wished to project. According to Cameron and others, speakers tend to opt for
metaphors that are largely consonant with their attitudes, perspectives and the
salient social identity (Cameron 2007).
5.2. Redeployment motivated by creative contradiction (Redeployment and

contrast as the dominant co-construction processes)
Example 4 provides an example of contrast (as an intra-speaker feature) and re-
deployment (inter-speakers). Both the features belong amongst recurrent phe-
nomena in the sample. Redeployment occurs when a speaker deploys the source
domain term used by one of the previous speakers, and applies it to a new target
domain. In the study of appropriation tendencies in the conciliation talks context,
Cameron (2007) and Gibbs and Cameron (2008) argue that deliberate source
term re-deployment tends to signal a desire for alignment. In contrast, in the
BDN context, it appears that redeployment tends to be used rather to challenge
one of the previous speakers than express convergence with the speaker. This is
illustrated by the example below, in which a long-standing member appears to
tease a fresh female co-member by redeploying a source domain term that she
had just used.
Table 5. Example 4. Example of contrast: marathon as a source term/Example of re-

deployment: sprint as a source term.
Speaker Transcript
(Sequence)
Salvia (2) . . . sometimes coming to solicitors can feel like a marathon since
occasionally you (??) and you can’t see the finish line. If you come to
the (company name), I can promise you it’s gonna be like a relay race.
We’re all going to be there to help each other and it’s gonna be like a
sprint. . .
Bryan (6) . . . steeple chase. The reason why (pauses to look at Salvia) is life is
not a sprint but I do like to get my leg over once in a while (laughter
XL)
Salvia, a young solicitor produced a triple simile, an extended metaphor from the
domain of running. She contrasted marathon, negative valence (cast as a long
and lonely experience: you can’t see the finish line) with relay race, positive
valence (cast as a collaborative and less strenuous experience) and then pro-
gressively with sprint, positive valence: stressing the speed and the lightness of
the movement. Bryan, a financial advisor and an established member re-applied
the domain of running in his steeplechase metaphor, and redeployed the source
term sprint with the generic target domain of life in life is not a sprint.
306 Hana Blazkova
In the explication of the steeplechase metaphor, Bryan broke the so far se-
rious mode, delivering a daring double-entendre, revivifying the conventional
metaphor get my leg over. He achieved the desired source domain coherence and
at the same time communicated the primary slang meaning. It is interesting to
note that before the explication, Bryan pauses (1s) and looks expressly at Salvia,
thus putting an additional spin on the line and generating a wave of appreciative
laughter. It is not clear whether Bryan intended to taunt Salvia. Yet, in an inter-
view that followed the BDN session, she commented on the connection between
the visual contact and the metaphor, suggesting that she viewed its use as highly
inappropriate and derogatory in regard to her and the other female participants.
Sexually-imbued humour appears to be a common male-bonding strategy
practised within the 4 BDN groups that were observed; it is a stereotypical re-
sponse to female gender’s minority status in the UK BDN groups (see Hogg and
Terry, 2000 on the influence of sociodemographic structure on group identity).
While such humour is effective in boosting the generic group cohesion, the ef-
fect on the minority female participants is ambivalent. The female members in
the core group suggested that sexual banter in most cases discourages higher
female participation in the BDN. The interviewed women asserted that this was
one of the prime characteristics which categorised the target BDN organisation
as an old-boys network, which initially appears as a somewhat discriminatory
and unprofessional environment to new female members.
The high jump metaphor in Example 5 provides another example where
one participant challenges the speaker through a) further developing and b)
redeploying the source term bar (as from the original set the bar in line 1),
which was used by Matt to refer to the obstacles within the domain of physical
performance/high jump. Matt’s lack of background knowledge of the source
domain (line 5–7) triggered an interruption from Paul, a high-status member
of the audience, and provided an opportunity for him to tease Matt. Paul’s first
comment was inaudible (line 6) but induced general laughter and prompted
Matt to acknowledge complete ignorance of the field (I know nothing). In his
response, Paul juggled the domains of physical and mental fitness (line 9, mental
disease), transforming the original physical obstacle into a mental one. The
instance of redeployment is spontaneous and appears to be primarily motivated
by the phonetic proximity, resulting in an eggcorn4 metal bar/mental bar (line
4. Eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words

that sound similar or identical in the speaker’s dialect. The new phrase introduces a
meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context, such as
old-timers’ disease for Alzheimer’s disease. (Peters 2006)
Table 6. Example 5. Development and re-deployment: bar as a source term
Speaker Line Transcript

Matt 1 . . . they had set the bar, I think it was at 2 metres 42, and
2 that was their absolute limit. They just could not get any
3 higher than that. As far as they was concerned that was a
4 limiting belief. 2 metres 42 was as far as they could possibly
5 jump. I’ve no idea – I know nothing about high jump. Like I
6 don’t know whether if it’s high or low. Is it high?
Paul 7 Yeah, /??/! (laughter XL)
Matt 8 I know nothing =
Paul 9 = [What mental disease? (laughter XL)
10 > Metal bar, metal bar, that’s what caught me up], it’s a
11 triangle mental bar! (laughter XXL)
10–11). Paul’s creativity again provoked appreciative laughter and somewhat

undermined Matt’s carefully constructed professional identity.
6. Emergent systematic metaphor: Profession as overcoming

limitations and identity implications of systematic metaphors
This part singles out a particular systematic metaphor for further analysis and
follows its gradual linguistic and conceptual metamorphoses across different
speakers. Then the analysis moves beyond the micro-level as potential profes-
sional and social identity outcomes of such metaphor use are reflected upon,
with particular attention given to the fluid concept of group prototype.
6.1. The analysis of profession as overcoming limitations systematic

metaphor
Bryan, whose steeplechase metaphor was analysed above (Example 4), was the
first one to conjure up a visual image of an obstacle, linguistically realised and
relexicalized in the subsequent speeches as a bar/hurdle/limit. As discussed in
detail above, his speech was metaphorical at multiple levels. He introduced a
new spin into a so far seriously taken task by revivifying a conventional sexual
expression. The metaphor was not picked up immediately; his speech was fol-
lowed by two speakers who in turn introduced stability and strength metaphor
(see the overview in the background section above). The next speaker, Paul
(8) responds to Bryan’s (6) double-entendre by delivering a similar one in his
pole vault metaphor. Example 6 below documents the local dynamics in which
308 Hana Blazkova
Table 7. Example 6. overcoming limitations in the steeplechase and pole vault

metaphor.
Speaker Transcript
Bryan (6) . . . steeple chase. The reason why (pauses to look at Salvia) is life is
not a sprint but I do like to get my leg over once in a while (laughter
XL)
Paul M (9) . . . the Olympic uh: sport would be pole vault. (audience cheering)
( laughs )Why?
Una (4) Why? (audience laughing: Yea::h!) I dunno I just like the pole vault.
Paul M (9) No, because however high you raise the bar, we’ll always get over it.
Paul extended the steeplechase metaphor, simultaneously incorporating both

the semantic domains of sexual and sports performance.
The sexual innuendo was possibly the primary source of inspiration for the
pole vault metaphor, and it triggered scattered laughter. The speaker, however,
abandoned the sexual reference in the explication metaphor that follows, re-
vivifying a conventional expression from sports source domain that tends to
be commonly used to highlight business performance: raise the bar and get
over the bar, thus innocently relexicalizing Bryan’s get my leg over. Paul was
first followed by a speaker who introduced an unrelated metaphor. The en-
suing speaker, however, returned to the overcoming limitations systematic
metaphor and changed the original nexus from surmounting difficulties and
overcoming limits into helping others to overcome them.
6.2. The analysis of profession as helping others overcome limitations

systematic metaphor
Jean (11), a chartered accountant and a long-standing member, recast and ex-
tended the original metaphor getting over the bar, revivifying a dead metaphor
in helping [her clients] over the hurdles, thus foregrounding client support while
downplaying the performance facet. The next speaker, Matt (12), followed her
speech, replicating and further developing the previously introduced bar struc-
ture: raise the bar /get over the bar in the opening part of his narrative: set the
bar/get any higher, and combining it with Jean’s (11) key element of helping
clients overcome obstacles. Matt casts himself in the role of a sports coach who
helps a high jumper overcome his/her limits. Enlisting a competence narrative
(Blazkova 2011) allows Matt to present the source domain in very fine detail.
The personae of the coach and the high jumper, the highly specific quantifica-
tion of the perceived limit/2 metres 42, and the very specific quantification of
Table 8. Example 7. overcoming limitations in the hurdles and high jump metaphor.
Speaker Transcript
Jean (11) . . . we do quite a lot of management buy-out type of work. If you know
anyone interested in looking at that sort of thing, we guarantee we will
help them over the hurdles that they face.
Matt (12) And talking about the Olympics, serendipity would have it, I was re-
cently working with a high jumper, because they had the difficulty –
they had set the bar, I think it was at 2 metres 42, and that was their
absolute limit. They just could not get any higher than that. As far as
they was concerned that was a limiting belief. 2 metres 42 was as far
as they could possibly jump. . .
the increased performance/increase that height in their following practice to 2

metres 46, create an unprecedented vividness and that in spite of Matt’s lack of
knowledge of the source domain and Paul’s subsequent challenge (see section
on competitive redeployment).
6.3. Prominent systematic metaphors: the implications for the display of

social identity
The four presentations given in Examples 6 and 7 and discussed in detail above
were all embedded in very different professional domains, yet they all enlisted
the same positioning systematic metaphor. The extent to which individual speak-
ers shared lexis and the measure of semantic closeness varied, as did the core
mappings. The systematic metaphor was, however, a clearly recognizable thread
connecting this particular series. The concept underlying this metaphor seems to
particularly resonate with the BDN members, as evidenced by a number of both
metaphorical and non-metaphorical allusions found in the wider BDN dataset.
The members often describe their business as: growing, expanding and devel-
oping, a business with a vision of becoming a major player in the UK market,
or moving beyond being one-man, two-man business.
The dataset is strewn with a plethora of references similar to the one below.
These references may have different linguistic realizations and differ in explicit
figures but they make the same point: last year, I’ve got twenty-eight thousand
pounds of business out of BNI. And I would like to thank you all for your help,
in doing that. My target this year is fifty thousand pounds, and half way through
the year I’m on track to achieve that. The majority of BDN members recruit
from either start-up businesses or small businesses aspiring to outgrow the small
310 Hana Blazkova
business category. The deployment of the overcoming limitations metaphor

thus succinctly communicates the espousal of a prototypical BDN value, regard-
less of whether the focus is on the individual or the customer, and thus appears
to communicate an important facet of group identity.
Apart from the analysed systematic metaphor, two other major groupings of
metaphors that were used systematically emerge: the performance metaphor
and helping customers perform metaphor. While both metaphor groups
were assigned a more general label than the overcoming limitations cate-
gory, the connection and the influence the speakers had on one another was
for the most part as highly pronounced as in the four cases that were anal-
ysed in this section. For example, consider the archery metaphor: Olympic sport
maybe it’d be archery/ we hit the target, for our clients, but we try to hit the
bull’s-eye every time and the javelin thrower metaphor: I would have prob-
ably said javelin thrower?/. . . we aim high, and we always make the mark.
These two metaphors are a clear indication of the degree of sharedness and
co-construction in performance metaphors. In the Olympic sample, the per-
formance metaphor becomes the most frequent (7 instances of use) and is
even more shared between the speakers than either the helping customers
metaphor or the overcoming limitations metaphor, with 5 and 4 instances
respectively.
It is these three uniting metaphors that appear to capture and communicate
important characteristics of both the professional and the prototypical group
identity. Metaphor here acts as an interface between the personal and group
identity. The use of the same systematic metaphors signals at one level personal
espousal of the communicated values, and at another level a convergence and
affinity to the emerging prototypical identity. Hogg and Terry (2000) define
group prototype as a shared construct and an epitome of all the characteristics
that represent the group and differentiate it from other groups, including beliefs,
attitudes, and dominant behaviours. The prototype has a degree of fixity and is
stored in memory, but at the same time it is fluid and subject to change as it is co-
constructed, maintained and modified by the features of the immediate or more
enduring social interactive context” (Hogg and Terry 2000:123). Thus proto-
typical identity is not a checklist of optimal characteristics but rather a fuzzy
set of attributes that captures context-dependent features of group membership
(Turner et al. 1987; Fiske and Taylor 1991).
I suggest that systematic metaphors indicate important aspects of group iden-
tity, and that social prototype emerges at the confluence of the most prominent
systematic metaphors. It appears that there is an active interrelationship between
specific larger systematic metaphors and the evolving definition of the group
prototype. The influence appears to be reciprocal: each systematic metaphor
contributes to the fluid definition of optimal group identity, and in turn the
dominance or recurrence of certain systematic metaphors appears to be partly
dictated by the existing group prototype. The claim that systematic metaphors
do not only communicate but also shape the facets of prototypical identity does
not entail a fragmented and entirely fleeting notion of social prototype. On the
contrary, while its definition indeed evolves through interaction, and in this
case through the use of larger systematic metaphors, social prototype retains
consistency (Edwards and Stokoe 2004).
The claim that the preferred choice of given systematic metaphors signals an
individual speakers’ affinity to the prototypical identity and ultimately influence
the definition of social prototype, does not in any way imply that the convergence
to the existing prototype is a conscious and pre-meditated effort. Indeed it can
hardly be so, given the time constraints under which the speakers produced their
sports metaphors. Conversely, the process is seen as similar to those involved
in the achievement of conversational synchrony, where for example, the micro-
synchrony of movements (e.g., Shockley et. al. 2003 in Richardson et. al. 2007)
is certainly not a product of pre-meditated effort but nonetheless serves a number
of communicative functions, including enhancing understanding and creating
alignment between the speakers. There are micro-motivators that contribute to
the resulting convergence to given systematic metaphors and prototypical values.
These motivational factors do not work in isolation but function in synergy, and
the boundaries of their influence are not clear-cut. The most salient factors
that appear to influence the metaphor and hence also the social identity co-
construction are discussed in the following section.
7. Discussion of chief factors motivating metaphor co-construction at

both local and macro-level
The analysis of the co-construction processes in BDN unveiled the highly in-
teractional character of speeches that initially tend to be perceived as relatively
monologic. There seem to be four dominant reasons why people in the BDN
context tend to appropriate metaphors used by other BDN participants. These
are [1] the time proximity factor, [2] convergence and high ingroup status fac-
tors: both can be subsumed under the oscillation towards the group prototype
category, [3] enduring metaphorical concepts, and [4] the competitive factor.
An overview of these influences is given in Figure 1, and each factor is treated
in detail in the discussion below.
312 Hana Blazkova
Repetition or elaboration Creation of alignment by

on metaphors introduced deploying a metaphor that
by a close predecessor had been received well
Elaboration on pre-
CONVERGENCE senters with high
TEMPORAL AND INGROUP group status
PROXIMITY STATUS
Oscillation to
group protype
COMPETITIVE ENDURING
Redeployment of a FACTOR METAPHORICAL Tendency to rely on
previously used meta- CONCEPTS enduring conceptual
phor with the intention metaphors
of teasing the author
Figure 1. Overview of the co-constructional drivers in the bdn scenario.
7.1. Temporal proximity: recency effect including creativity crisis

Metaphor repetition or development in interactional situations may, among other
triggers, involve a recency effect, a cognitive bias that results from disproportion-
ate salience of recent stimuli (Littlemore and Low 2006:205; Gibbs and Cameron
2008; Blazkova 2011). Figure 2 below suggests that there is a fairly marked local
pattern to the use of metaphor, indicating an aspect of temporal proximity, i.e. the
speakers’ inclination towards co-construction in relatively close succession. The
figure recapitulates the distribution of systematic metaphors in the BDN presen-
tations. The vertical axis gives the sequence of the speakers; the horizontal axis
lists the 6 broad systematic metaphor categories to which the presenters sub-
scribed based on their sports metaphor. The systematic metaphor categories were
previously listed and discussed in the overview (Table 1). Systematic metaphors
were identified in the following way: source terms in metaphorical expressions
were aggregated into groups based on their basic/non-metaphorical meaning,
and then labels such as business as performance were chosen for individual
categories. Highlighted coordinates in the figure below signal the use of a given
systematic metaphor by the given speaker. Black indicates the first use of the
respective systematic metaphor; dark grey represents immediate repetition or
development of the metaphor introduced by the previous speaker. Light grey
signals metaphor appropriation within 60 seconds of its use, accentuating the
instances of repetition or development with a gap of one speaker. White delin-
eated rectangle signifies a further gap between the speakers, representing the
Figure 2. Time proximity motivating metaphor appropriation in the BDN Olympic

dataset.
instances of repetition or development with a maximum three-minute gap. A

dashed line indicates a challenge to the metaphor communicated by previous
speakers (e.g., the instance of redeployment of sprint in Bryan’s (6) metaphor).
The speakers were clearly more likely to respond, elaborate on, or challenge
metaphors that were introduced either by their immediate predecessors or deliv-
ered within 3 minutes prior to their speech. Based on the visual representation
314 Hana Blazkova
above, systematic metaphors were in 7 instances shared within a single minute,

and in other cases they were mostly repeated within 3 minutes. One of the exam-
ples further supporting the time proximity argument is the echo metaphor de-
livered by Mark (5), where he not only repeats the metaphor used by Una (4) but
also mirrors her syntax and appropriates her lexis (see Example 3). In this case,
what seemed to have prompted the almost verbatim reproduction is the recency
effect combined with a momentary creativity crisis, where the spontaneous re-
sponse to the perceived lack of inspiration is to repeat the most recent stimuli.
7.2. Oscillation towards the group prototype: creating alignment with the
audience
7.2.1. Creating alignment with the audience
Repetition or co-construction of metaphor in conversations is predominantly
used for collaborative purposes; speakers repeat each others’ structures to create
a relationship of accord and convergence. By repeating what their conversational
partner said, speakers seek to enhance social bonds and create alignment with the
other person (Tannen [1987] 2007; Carter 2004; Littlemore and Low 2006 inter
alia). As in conversations, co-construction within the BDN scenario was clearly
inspired by seeking alignment with the other interactants. Yet, unlike in conver-
sations, co-construction in the BDN episode was not stimulated by an attempt
to create the atmosphere of accord with the author of original metaphor. Rather
than being motivated by collaborative tendencies, metaphor appropriation is
here motivated by the positive response of the audience to the original metaphor
(Blazkova, 2011). If a metaphor received a good response, such as laughter (e.g.
Bryan (6)), or compliment and affirmation from the audience (e.g. Una (4), it
was increasingly likely to be elaborated by the following speakers. The speakers
tended to rely on a proven concept, a concept that expresses shared values. Yet,
the overall tendency is competitive rather than collaborative.
7.2.2. High perceived ingroup status

Another aspect of co-constructional motivation in the BDN scenario is very
closely connected with the point introduced above. The speakers tended to elab-
orate on the presenters with a high perceived ingroup status, i.e. the presenters
that were at that point seen as the core members, the prototypical members of
the BDN group: Paul (1), Bill (3), Bryan (6) and Jean (11). On the contrary,
metaphors introduced by the relatively new members or members with a lower
ingroup status, such as the stability metaphor by Steve (7) and the strength
metaphor by Mal (8), both represent outlier cases; both met with resounding
lack of interest, and neither was reintroduced by other members.
7.3. Enduring metaphorical concepts

The existence or the absence of enduring metaphorical concepts also plays an
important role in the attraction of individual metaphors, and affects the likeli-
hood that they will be appropriated and further developed. There are highly fixed
and mainstream conceptual metaphors, such as life is a journey, and their re-
lational mappings give rise to an array of meaning correspondences (such as
people are travellers, problems are obstacles on the journey) with specific con-
ventional expressions referring to aspects of these meaning correspondences or
inferences (Gibbs and Cameron, 2008). The example of life is a journey intro-
duces a particularly rich and universal conceptual domain, and in fact even un-
derlies some of the conventional metaphorical expressions in the BDN Olympic
sample, e.g. we help our customers overcome the hurdles they face. The uni-
versality of the conceptual domain and the ensuing availability of ready-made,
pre-fabricated metaphorical structures thus play an important part in determin-
ing whether a certain metaphor will be picked for further elaboration, especially
if the speakers are given limited time for the metaphor production.
7.4. Competitive goal: Challenge and creative contradiction

As discussed in detail in the section on redeployment, the BDN metaphor was
sometimes picked up and redeployed in order to challenge or tease the original
author, as documented in the sprint example and in the metal bar → mental bar
combination.
8. Conclusions
In interactional situations, people tend to deploy each other’s syntactic structures

(Branigan et al. 2000 in Richardson et al. 2007), their accents tend to become
more alike (Giles et al. 1992), and even their movements are highly synchronized,
down to the coordination of individual gestures and eye movements (Kempton
1980 in Tannen [1989] 2007; Richardson et al. 2007). The conversational syn-
chrony serves many purposes, such as ensuring smooth and intelligible flow of
conversation, and creating alignment between the interactants (Dijksterhuis and
Bargh 2001 in Richardson et al., 2007; Tannen 1989/2007; Carter 2004 inter
alia). The use of metaphors is equally coordinated, and metaphors are nego-
tiated and co-constructed across speakers for a number of reasons (Cameron
316 Hana Blazkova
2007; Gibbs and Cameron, 2008). Metaphor appropriation/co-construction is

a natural result of the dynamic (e.g., Holmes 2006 a and b; Cameron 2007,
2008) and dialogic nature of language (Bakhtin 1986). The analysis of the BDN
Olympic dataset indicated that the tendency to repeat and elaborate on metaphors
introduced by the previous speakers was particularly pronounced in the BDN
Olympics scenario.
Metaphor appropriation was studied in detail both at the level of its micro-
processes and their interesting evolution at the level of the BDN episode. Three
groups of dominant systematic metaphors emerged from the analysis: [1] the
performance metaphor as the most universal and shared systematic metaphor
group (7 instances of use) [2] the helping customers metaphor (5 instances
of use), and [3] overcoming limitations with 4 instances of use. I suggested
that these three uniting metaphors captured salient characteristics of profes-
sional identity and, perhaps more interestingly, of the prototypical group iden-
tity. Metaphor was perceived to act as an interface between the personal and
group identity. The use of the same systematic metaphors signalled at one level
personal espousal of the communicated values, and at another level cognitive
assimilation of self to the emerging ingroup prototype. There appeared to be an
active interrelationship: the evolving definition of prototypical group identity
seemed to emerge at the confluence of the most prominent systematic metaphors
and, in turn, the recurrence of given systematic metaphors appeared to be partly
dictated by the existing conception of the group prototype.
While the preferred choice of given systematic metaphors signals an individ-
ual speaker’s affinity to the prototypical identity and ultimately influences the
definition of social prototype, it is not a result of complex thought or conscious
pre-meditated effort (Gibbs and Cameron 2008). The process of metaphor co-
construction and the emergence of larger systematic metaphors is navigated
through an interplay of many micro-factors. The most salient influences that
were identified in this study included the temporal proximity factor, conver-
gence and high ingroup status factors, enduring metaphorical concepts, and
the competitive factor. Temporal proximity indicates that speakers tended to
elaborate mostly on metaphors that were introduced shortly before their own
speech. Convergence suggests the tendency to appropriate metaphors that had
been particularly well received by the audience; high ingroup status suggests that
the social attraction of the speaker enhances the likelihood that his/her metaphor
will be later appropriated and developed. The existence or the absence of en-
during metaphorical concepts also plays an important role in the attraction of
individual metaphors; the universality of the conceptual domain and the ensuing
availability of ready-made pre-fabricated metaphorical structures contribute to
whether a certain metaphor will be picked for further elaboration. The compet-
itive factor denotes the tendency for metaphor appropriation that was observed
in cases when the speaker wished to challenge his/her predecessor, and was
achieved through creative re-deployment of the contested metaphor.
It is important to note that co-construction motivational factors do not work in
isolation but function in synergy, and the boundaries of their influence are fuzzy.
The micro-motivators jointly contribute to convergence by group members on
particular ways of using language [metaphor], thus increasing the group cohe-
sion and shaping and reinforcing the conception of the group prototype. Rather
than being an interesting deviation, the appropriation of semiotic resources, in-
cluding metaphor, is normal and normative; it enables communication in new
communities of practice and novel genres, such as the BDN and its 60-sec slot,
and ultimately facilitates the emergence of a distinct group identity.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas
Press Slavic Series (8).
Brauer, David and Eric Miller
2008 Factors underlying the decline in manufacturing employment since
2000. A Series of Issue Summaries from the Congressional Budget Of-
fice. Retrieved from http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/97xx/doc9749/12-
23-Brief.shtml
Blazkova, Hana
2011 Telling Tales of Professional Competence: Narrative in 60-Second
Networking Speeches. Journal of Business Communication 48(4):
446–463.
Blommaert, Jan
2006 Applied ethnopoetics. Narrative Inquiry 16(1): 181–190.
Branigan, Holly, Martin Pickering and Alexandra Cleland
2000 Syntactic coordination in dialogue. Cognition 75:13–25.
Cameron, Lynne
2007 Patterns of metaphor use in reconciliation talk. Discourse and Society
18:197–222.
Cameron, Lynne
2008 Metaphor shifting in the dynamics of talk. In Zannoto, Mara. Sophia,
Cameron Lynne., Cavalcanti, Marilda. C. (eds.) Confronting Metaphor
in Use: An Applied Linguistic Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamin
Publishing.
Carl, Walter
2006 What’s all the buzz about? Everyday communication and the relational
basis of word-of-mouth and buzz marketing practices. Management
Communication Quarterly 19(4): 601–634.
318 Hana Blazkova
Carl, Walter
2008 The role of disclosure in organized word-of-mouth marketing pro-
grams. Journal of Marketing Communications, 14(3): 225–241.
Carter, Ronald
2004 Language and CommonTalk: theArt of Creativity.London: Routledge.
Dijksterhuis, Ap and John Bargh
2001 The perception-behavior expressway: Automatic effects of social per-
ception on social behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychol-
ogy 33: 1–40.
Edwards, Derek and Elizabeth Stokoe
2004 Discursive psychology, focus group interviews, and participants’ cat-
egories. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 22:499–507.
Fiske, Susan and Shelley Taylor
1991 Social Cognition (2nd edition). New York: Mc Graw and Hill.
Gibbs, Ray W. and Lynne Cameron
2008 The social-cognitive dynamics of metaphor performance. Cognitive
System Research 9: 64–75.
Hogg, Michael A. and Deborah J. Terry
2000 Social identity and self-categorization processes in organizational con-
texts. Academy of Management Review 25(1): 121–140.
Holmes, Janet
2006a Workplace narrative, professional identity and relational practice. In
De Fina, Anna, Schiffrin, Deborah, and Bamberg, Michael (eds.) Dis-
course and Identity. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holmes Janet
2006b Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity through Work-
place Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Hymes, Dell H.
1996 Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Under-
standing of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis.
Hymes, Dell H.
2003 Now I Know Only So Much: Essays in Ethnopoetics. Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press.
Kempton, Willet
1980 The rhythmic basis of interactional microsynchrony. In Ritchie Kay,
M.(ed.) The Relationship of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication.
67–75. The Hague: Mouton.
Littlemore, Janet and Graham Low
2006 Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning. New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Litvin, Steve W., Rachael. E. Goldsmith and Bing Pan
2008 Electronic word-of-mouth in hospitality and tourism management.
Tourism Management 29 (3): 458–468.
McCroskey, James C. and J.J. Teven

1999 Goodwill: A re-eximantion of the construct and its measurement.
Communication Monographs, 66:90–103.
Misner, Ivan
1993 Business development networks: an exploratory study of key variables
contributing to their impact on business community. PhD Thesis, Uni-
versity of Southern California.
Misner, Ivan
2008 29 Per Cent Solution: 52Weekly Networking Success Strategies.Austin:
Greenleaf Book Group.
Misner, Ivan
2010 Personal communication.
Office for National Statistics
2010 Statistical Bulletin. Business Demography 2009. Retrieved from
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/bd1210.pdf.
Peters, Mark
2006 Word watch: the eggcorn: lend me your ear. Psychology Today 39
(2):18.
Pragglejaz Group
2007 A practical and flexible method for identifying metaphorically used
words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1), 1–39.
Reeher, Jason
2010 Service Industry vs. Manufacturing Industry. Retrieved from
http://www.ehow.com/about 5419144 service-industry-vs-
manufacturing-industry.html
Richardson, Daniel, Rick Dale and Natasha. Z. Kirkham
2007 The Art of Conversation is coordination : common ground and the
coupling of eye movements during dialogue. Psychological Science
18: 407–413.
Semino, Elena
2008 Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shane, Scott
2010 Start-up Odds of Survival Depend on Industry. Retrieved from
http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/09/start-up-odds-osurvival-
industry.html
Steen, Gerhard
1994 Understanding Metaphor in Literature. London: Longman.
Steen, Gerhard
2008 The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model
for metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 23(4): 213–241.
Steen, Gerhard
2011a The contemporary theory of metaphor – now new and improved! Re-
view of Cognitive Linguistics. 9(1): 26–64.
320 Hana Blazkova
Steen, Gerhard
2011b From three dimensions to five steps: The value of deliberate metaphor.
metaphorik.de 21/2011.
Tannen, Deborah
1989 Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational
Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Steve D. Reicher and Margaret
Wetherell
1987 Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory. Ox-
ford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Subject index
Advertising 11, 156 Corpus

Antithesis 57, 236 – Corpus annotation 208
– Corpus Brasileiro 104, 106, 113, 115,
Barter 27–28, 37, 49 118, 124
Blending theory 229, 232, 234–235 – Corpus Linguistics 201, 204
Brazilian Presidents Crisis management 252, 254, 257
– Emilio Garrastazu Médici 105 Culture 10, 52, 54, 96, 130, 156, 162–
– Ernesto Geisel 105 163, 165, 267
– Joao Baptista Figueiredo 105–106 Currency
– Fernando Collor de Mello 113 – Indexation currency 110
– Itamar Franco 115–116 – Safe-haven currency / anchor cur-
– José Sarney 107, 108, 111, 113 rency 90
– Luis Inácio da Silva 9, 113, 118–119, – Token vs bullion currency 28
123 – Transactions 6, 29, 38, 41, 44, 253,
– Tancredo Neves 107 255, 257,
Business
– BDN 60-seconds 293–294 Decision Theory 166
– Development Networks (BDN) 16, Domino effect 103
291, 293
– 60-second rhetoric 292 Economic theory 4–7, 25, 60, 81–82,
– Studies 2, 206, 212, 219 159, 206
Economic crisis 4, 15, 123
Case study 16, 160–161, 218, 291, 294, Eggcorn 306
298 Embodiment 7, 57–58, 185, 195, 237
Co-construction processes 291–292, Entailments 7, 14, 163, 225, 227–231,
302–303, 305, 311 233, 235, 236, 247
Cognitive linguistics 10, 11, 57, 157, Equilibrium 3, 36–37, 44–45, 54, 69,
163, 166, 168, 244 70, 81–83, 214, 281
Cohesion 267, 306, 317
Coherence 115, 228–230, 267, 306 Fluid mechanics 3, 84
Competence 162, 196, 298–299, 301– Frames / Framing 5–6, 8–9, 13–15, 22,
302, 308 27, 29–30, 36–45, 54, 66, 68, 125,
Competitive factor 311–312, 316 155, 158, 180–181, 187, 202, 228,
Conceptual schemes 29, 54 236, 243–253, 255–257, 259–261,
Conversational synchrony 311, 315 270, 281, 298, 302
Corpora 9, 12, 17, 103–104, 129, 145–
148, 162, 164, 168, 201, 203–204, 206– Gesture 12, 17, 175–180, 182–186, 188,
208, 211–212, 214, 216, 226, 243–245, 196, 315
249, 265, 269–284 Genre 33–35, 130–132, 147, 156, 162–
Corporate communication 243–245, 249 163, 176, 182, 219, 245, 317
322 Subject index
Goldilocks 92 Interaction 11–14, 27, 30, 36, 44, 156,

Goodwill 11, 165, 168, 244, 298, 300– 176, 182, 202, 207, 217, 230, 243–
301 244, 246–247, 258, 269, 291, 302,
Greek terms 311–312, 315
– Argýrion 30–31, 33, 38, 39,42 Invariance Hypothesis 228–230, 234
– Árgyros 30–31, 33, 36–39, 41–43 Irony 201, 203–204, 213, 217–219
– Chalcós 30–31, 33, 36–39, 41–42
– Chréma 30–31, 33, 37, 39–40 Knowledge Specialization 5, 265–266,
– Chrysós 30–31, 33, 36–37, 40 270, 284
– Drachmé 30–31, 34, 36–37, 39–40,
42, 45 Lectures 10, 12–13, 83, 201, 204–207,
– Électron 30–31, 34, 36–37, 39–41, 212, 215–219
43 Lexicography 161
– Mna 30–31, 34, 38, 41–42 Literal effect hypothesis 155
– Nómisma 6, 30–31, 34, 37–40
– Obelós 30, 32, 34, 36–37, 40, 42 Mapping (non-mapping) 7, 16, 53–55,
– Startér 30, 32, 34, 38, 40, 42 57–59, 61, 63, 70–71, 104, 106, 108,
– Tálanton 30, 32, 35–37, 39, 41–42 123, 132, 146, 163, 228–229, 234–
– Tókos 30, 32, 35, 39–40, 45 237, 247, 273, 281, 299–301, 309,
– Trápedsa 30, 32, 35, 39, 43, 45 315
Media 14, 21, 28–30, 92, 125, 155,
Headword 157, 165 243–245, 248–249, 260, 262–263,
287
High ingroup status factor 311, 316
Merchandise 31, 33, 39, 41, 111
Homeric period 6, 30
Metaphor /s
Hyperbole 10, 12–13, 17, 201, 208,
– and “life-cycle” 67–68, 85
210, 214–219
– and meta-theoretical problems 66–67
– and natural disasters 4, 159
Identity – and pithiness 14, 225
– Group identity 16, 291–292, 306, – and rhetoric 13, 79, 159, 163, 203,
310–311, 316–317 212, 215, 218, 233, 236–238, 245,
– Professional identity 298, 301–302, 291–293
304, 307, 316 – Appropriation 177, 291–292, 302–
– Prototypical group identity 291–292, 305, 312–314, 316–317
310, 316 – Biological metaphor 6–7, 52, 54–56,
– Social identity 291, 302, 305, 307, 58, 60–61, 63, 66–69, 87, 91
309, 311 – Building metaphor 9, 147, 273–274,
Ideology 3, 97, 159 280, 284
Image – Catachrestic role of 8, 79, 81
– Image-schema 227–229, 232–233, – Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)
235–236, 238 7, 17, 181, 225–227, 229, 235
– Imagery frames 30 – Conceptual metaphors
Inflation 6, 8–9, 81, 94, 103, 105, 107– – argument is conflict 233
113, 115–118, 125, 164, 210, 226, – business is (nautical) travel
277 14, 225–227, 229, 232, 235
Subject index 323
– economic conditions are – Observatory of metaphors 8, 77, 98

weather 14, 225–226 – Organic metaphor 3–4, 7, 77, 94
– life is a journey 94, 107, 228– – Proto-metaphor 8, 89
230, 315 – Redeployment 303, 305–306, 309,
– problems are burdens 124, 233 312–313, 315
– time is money 229 – Repetition 303–304, 312, 314
– trade is friendship 237 – Root metaphor 4, 81, 88–89, 91–94,
– trade is war 233, 237–238 96–97
– Communicative role of metaphor 3 – Surface metaphor 8, 84, 92–94, 97,
– Corpus in business press headlines 98
131 – Theory-constitutive metaphor 6–8, 58,
– Cross-linguistic study of metaphor 77, 93, 96, 98
129, 131, 147, 149 – Systematic metaphor 16, 292, 297–
– Dead metaphor 81, 167, 185, 236, 302, 307–312, 314, 316
308 – Situatedness of metaphor 5, 71
– Dormant metaphor 81 – Substitution theory 79
– Echo metaphor 16, 303–304, 314 – Vertical variation 266, 283–284
– Economy metaphor and ELT 130– Metonymy 6, 13, 15, 17, 30, 39, 46,
131, 146 112, 179, 184, 187, 189, 195–196
– Elaboration and extension 4, 13, 14, Military dictatorship 105–107
55–56, 65, 69, 92, 226, 229–236, Money
238, 303–305, 308, 312, 315–316 – All-purpose money 28, 38, 41–43
– Enduring metaphorical concept 311– – Coin and Coinage 5–6, 17, 27–29,
312, 315–316 31–34, 36, 38–42, 44–45, 55, 92,
– Engine metaphor 10 168, 237
– Evolutionary metaphors 87 – Credit money 28
– Exegetical metaphor 80–81, 94 – Fiduciary money 28
– Horizontal variation of 265–266 – Monetization 29, 43
– Heuristic function of metaphor 77, – Non-coinage money 28
78, 91, 95 – Special-purpose money 28, 36, 38,
44
– Iconic metaphor 81
Myth 6, 37–39, 43–45
– In project management 268, 269,
280–282, 284
Numerical exaggeration 12–13, 201,
– Invisible Hand metaphor 3, 81–83
204, 208, 216, 217
– Mechanistic metaphor 7, 77, 84, 89,
91, 93–94, 132 Overgeneralization 12, 201, 204, 208,
– Metaphorical networks 8, 77–78, 89– 214
90, 92–96
– Nineteenth – and early twentieth cen- Perfect storm 13, 14, 225–227, 229–238
tury conceptions of metaphors Persuasion 13, 201–202
– Campbell, N. 53 Profit 7, 37, 40–42, 45, 88, 106, 210,
– Marshall, A. 1–2, 4, 7, 49–54, 244, 253–254, 280
56–57, 61–62, 64–70
– Spencer, H. 7, 52, 55, 61–67 Recency effect 312, 314
– Ward, L . 53 Relexicalization 303
324 Subject index
Salary 9, 105–106, 111, 125 – Econophysics 91

Science – Mechanical physics 82
– Bioeconomics 87 Source domain 5, 7–8, 54–56, 58–59,
– Biology 4, 49–50, 51, 56, 61, 62, 84, 90, 95, 109, 114, 121, 131, 136,
65–70, 78, 82–84, 87–88, 98, 101, 137, 140–142, 146–147, 176, 186,
267 246, 265, 269, 274–275, 283, 297,
– Economics 301, 303, 305–306, 308–309
– Academic discipline 2, 5, 25
– Evolutionary economics 52, 61–
Time proximity effect / temporal prox-
62, 68–69, 86, 91
imity 16, 304, 312–314
– Macroeconomics 85, 205, 207
Translation 9–11, 17, 64, 129–137, 139–
– Microeconomics 85, 205, 207,
143, 145, 147–150, 155–158, 160–
– Neuroeconomics 88
168, 202
– Thermoeconomics 91
– Backward translation 10, 129–132
– Mathematics 3, 4, 83, 96, 204, 266
– Medicine 4, 33–34, 61, 85, 115, 118 – Translatability 155, 162
– Natural science 79, 82, 86 – Translator studies 155, 166
– Physics 7, 50–51, 53–54, 65, 78, 82,
83, 91, 98 Wage 107, 110–111, 121, 125, 214
Author Index
Adams, O.S. 203 Caballero, R. 9, 57–58, 175

Ahrens, K. 130, 132, 145, 148 Cacchiani, S. 204
Alchian, A.A. 69 Calbris, G. 183
Alejo, R. 1, 267 Cameron, L. 16, 176–177, 186, 265,
Almagro Esteban, A. 161 291, 297–298, 302–305, 312, 315–
Allen, L. 177 316
Arac, J. 202 Campbell, N.R. 53
Aristotle 3, 28, 33–35, 37, 50, 56, 59, Cano Mora, L. 202, 207, 212, 217
78–79, 201 Carl W. 293
Arleo, A. 175, 178 Carter, R. 202, 208–210, 213–215, 217,
314–315
Baer, K.E. 64 Casanave, P. 160
Cavalcanti, M.C. 265
Baer, W. 125
Chantraine, P. 30
Backhouse, R. 4, 27, 29
Charteris-Black, J. 1, 13, 77, 131, 159,
Bakhtin, M. 302, 316
247, 267–268
Bargh, J. 315
Chesterman, A. 155, 158, 166
Barnden, J. 13
Christensen, P.P. 60
Berber S.T. 8, 121–122
Chung, S.F. 10, 130–132, 145, 147–148
Bergen, B. 203
Cienki, A. 176, 180, 183, 186, 188, 189
Bergenholtz, H. 160–161 Coates, D. 4
Bielenia-Grajewska, M. 159 Cohen E. 27, 37
Binsted K. 203 Cohen, I.B. 61
Black, M. 51, 79, 230, 236, 266 Cohen, T. 188
Blair, H. 3 Colander, D. 89
Blazkova, H. 14, 16, 298, 302, 308, Colston, H.L. 202, 204, 213
312, 314 Cordes, C. 87
Blommaert J. 304 Cortés del Rı́o, M.E. 3, 15
Boers, F. 1, 77, 95, 97, 132, 175, 267 Cortezzi, M. 80
Bondi, M. 214 Coulson, S. 3, 234
Borges, J.L. 98 Cournot, A. 83
Booth, R.A. 129 Cowie, M. 166
Boulding, K.E. 69 Cowling, D. 5
Bowler, P.J. 64 Crawford C., B. 2, 10, 12, 205, 212,
Boyd, R. 58, 79, 81, 266 217
Branigan H. 315 Crivellato, E. 56
Brauer, D. 292
Brett, P. 161 Dam, H.V. 155
Brône, G. 3 Darwin, C. 62, 65–67, 69, 70, 85, 87
Brutt-Griffler, J. 155 Dasgupta, P. 2
326 Author Index
Davanzati, B. 55, 58 Gentner, D. 50

Debatin, B. 94 Gibbels, E. 202
Deignan, A. 9, 130, 136, 149, 182, 267, Gibbs, R.W. 1, 103, 177, 202–203, 302,
269 305, 312, 315–316
Demosthenes 33, 35, 40 Gilpin, R. 56
Depestel, I. 131 Glassburner, B. 52
Denzau, A.T. and D.C. North 70 Goldsmith, R. 292
Dijksterhuis, A. 315 Goatly, A. 3, 13, 29
Dirven, R. 3 Gould, S.J. 69–70, 85
Dobrovol’skij, D. 9 Grant, D. 216, 268–269
Dodd, S.D. 158 Grady, J.E. 132
Duyck, W. 131 Grey, W. 79, 85
Grondelaers, S. 9
Edgeworth, F.Y. 89 Grosse, C.U. 161
Edwards, D. 311 Gullberg, M. 177–178
Eff, A. 56 Guzman, A. 6
Ellis, R. 134
Ennis, T. 131, 267–268 Hacking, I. 57
Entmam, R. 245 Halliday, M.A.K. 160
Erreygers, G. 1 Harris, W. 27–29, 42–43
Eskerod, P. 269, 280, 284 Harrison, J. 232
Eubanks, P. 1, 13–14, 17, 237–238, 250, Harvey, W. 7, 71, 85
267 Hayek, F. 89
Evans, S. 156 Hayes, S.C. 4
Evans, V. 246 Henderson, W. 1, 80, 97, 267
Herrera, H. 1, 3, 9, 13, 131, 267
Fahnestock, J. 236, Hesse, M.B. 53
Farrelly, M. 5 Hobbes, T. 60, 79
Fauconnier, G. 79, 229, Hodgson, G.M. 49, 51, 66, 69, 87, 132
Fias, W. 131 Hogg, M. 306, 310
Fillmore, Ch. 29, 246 Holton, G. 84
Fisher, S. 89 Howe, J. 58
Fiske, S. 310 Holmgreen, L-L. 13, 15, 245, 250
Flowerdew, L. 161 Holmes, J. 316
Foa, B. 55, 70–71 Huang, C.M. 130, 132, 145, 148
Fogelin, R. 51 Hunston, S. 142
Fukuda, K. 1 Hymes, D. 29, 304
Forceville, Ch. 3
Frank, R.M. 5, 57 Jackson, J. 205
Frost, R. 98, 227–228, 230 Jäkel, O. 1
Fuertes-Olivera, P. 3, 9, 10, 155–157, Jacobs, G. 1
161–164, 166 Jaques, T. 205
Jeffreys, D. 1
Gabrys, D. 130 Jevons, W.S. 83, 88
Garcı́a Villalón, J. 164–165 Jin, L. 80
Geeraerts, D. 9 Jing-Schmidt, Z. 9
Author Index 327
Johnson, M. 1, 29, 58, 80, 94, 129, 158, Mankiw, G. 95

181, 184, 228–229, 247, 258 Marshall, A. 1–2, 4, 7, 49–54, 56–57,
61–62, 64–71, 81, 83, 86
Kangasharju, H. 177 Martin, J.R. 209
Keller, S.B. 202 Martı́n de la Rosa, M.V. 3
Kempton, W. 315 Martı́nez Barbeito, J. 155, 164–165
Kirkpatrick, A. 205 Mason, M. 1
Kita, S. 178 Mata, T. 2
Klamer, A. 80 Menand, A. 52
Knop, S. 3 Menard, C. 51, 56, 65–66
Knudsen , S. 267 Mervis, C.B, 146
Koller, V. 1, 3, 5, 267–268 Meyer, I. 11, 159–160
Kövecses, Z. 9, 57, 246–247, 258 Miller, E. 292
Krauss, R. 192
Miller, L. 217
Kress, G. 181
Mio, J.S. 175
Kreuz, R.J. 202–204, 208, 213, 219
Mirowski, P. 3, 54, 68, 82
Kroll, J.H. 29, 36–37, 39, 42–43
Mittelberg, I. 176, 183–184, 186
Kuhn, T.S. 80, 266
Morgan, G. 175, 178, 268–269
Lakoff, G. 1, 14, 29, 52, 58, 60, 80, 94, Mourier, L. 160–162
119, 129, 158, 181, 184, 228–229, Mouton, N.T.O. 4, 6–7, 16–17, 53, 68–
247, 258 69, 82–83
Lammiman, J. 86 Müller, C. 180, 183, 188–189
Lamont, N. 3 Mulligan, D. 205
Landau, M. 54 Musolff, A. 3, 5, 131, 267
Leech, J 208
Lemercier, C. 2 Nadeau, R. 83
Limoges, C. 51, 56, 65–66 Nassif, L. 117
Lindstromberg, S. 1 Nelson, R. 69
Littlemore, J. 10, 182, 192, 303, 312, Nerlich, B. 54
314 Nesi, H. 207
Litvin, S., 292 Nisbet, R. 52, 62
López Maestre, M.D. 1 Ngan-Ying Kwong, R. 192
Lovejoy, A.O. 58 Nordhaus, W.D. 2, 94, 205
Low, G. 175, 176, 303, 312, 314 Norrick, N.R. 203
Lu, L. 132
Lucas, R. 81
O’Brien, J. 202, 204, 213
Maasen, S. 266, 284 O’Connor, K.T. 131
MacArthur, F. 196 O’Dougherty, M. 106
McCarthy, M. 202, 208–210, 213–215, O’Halloran, K. 176
217 Okun, A. 81
McCloskey, D.N. 1, 50, 218 Olhrogge, A. 204
Macfarlane, B. 205, 206 Oresme, N. 55, 58–60
Mackintosch, K. 11, 159–160 Orts Llopis, M.A. 5, 158
Mandelbaum, M. 64 Oswick, C. 268, 269
328 Author Index
Pan B. 292 Schumpeter, J.A. 87

Pareto, W. 83 Scott, M. 208–209
Partington, A. 176 Searle, J. 51, 67
Penrose, E. 68–69, 85 Semino, E. 8, 131, 182, 301
Pepper, S.C. 4 Shane, S. 292
Peters, M. 306 Shanon, B. 57
Phillips, B. 4, 84, 91 Shockley, D. 311
Pindar, 33, 40 Shuttleworth, M. 166
Piirainen , E. 9 Simpson, R.C. 204, 210
Piqué J. 267 Singer, P. 104
Pizarro-Sánchez, I. 11, 155, 163–164 Siqueira, M. 156–157
Pomerantz, A. 202–203 Skorczynska, H. 14, 159, 267, 269, 277,
Poos, D. 210 284
Pragglejaz Group , 12, 16, 157, 179, Slade, D. 182
297 Smith, A. 3, 49, 65, 81–83, 85,
Smith, G.P. 1, 267–268
Quesnay, F. 4, 8, 55, 60, 81, 85 Smith, M. 274
Quinn, J.K. 129 Spencer, H. 7, 52, 55, 61–67, 87
Quinn, R. 180 Stanivukovic, G.V. 202
Steen, G. 1, 151, 177, 186, 291, 297,
Ramsey, F.P. 89
301–303
Reeher, J. 292
Stewart, R. 180
Resche, C. 4, 5–8, 77, 82, 87, 93, 98
Solska, A. 130
Reynvoet, B. 131
Stockwell, P. 230
Ribatti, D. 56
Stokoe, E. 311
Ricardo, D. 83
Sueyoshi, A. 177
Richards, I.A. 234
Sutton, C. 80
Richarson, D. 311, 315
Swales, J.M. 175, 217
Ritchie, D. 177
Syrett, M. 86
Roberts, R.M. 202–204, 208, 213, 219
Rogerson-Revell, P. 155–156, 161
Rojo López, A.M. 5, 158 Tadros, A. 214
Rorty, R. 57 Tan, K.H. 161
Rosch, E. 146 Tannen, D. 302, 314–315
Rothschild, M. 88 Tarp, S. 161–162
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. 1 Tejada, P. 6
Ruiz Sánchez, A. 202 Tellier, M. 177
Terry, D. 306, 310
Sager, J.C. 159 Teuber, 164
Samaniego F., E. 10, 162–163, 166 Thomas, B. 51, 62
Samuelson, P.A. 2, 94, 205, Thompson, P. 207
Schaps, D.M. 27–29, 36–37, 41, 42 Thornbury, S. 182
Schäffner, C. 163 Tirrell, L. 51
Scheidel, 29, 39, 44 Tsang, J. 204, 208, 211, 217
Schmid, J.J. 130 Turner, J. 310
Schmidt, R. 160 Turner, M. 14, 79, 228–229, 234, 247
Author Index 329
Ungerer, F. 130 Weingart, P. 16, 266, 284

White, M. 1, 3, 4, 9, 94, 131–132, 158,
Van der Meer, G. 156–157 267
Van Leeuwen, T. 181 White, P.R.R. 209
Van Lier, L. 160 Willan, T.S. 67
Veblen, T. 56, 61–62, 69, 86–87 Winter, S.G. 69
Velasco-Sacristán, M. 10, 166 Wittgenstein, L. 79
Viner, J. 85 Wolcott, H.F. 160
Vuorela, T. 156, 161
Vygotsky, L. 177 Yin, R.K. 161
Walker, D.A. 54, 161 Zaluski, V. 11, 159–160

Walras, L. 81, 83 Zanotto, M.S. 265
Ward, L.F. 53 Zethsen, K.K. 155
Waugh, L. 184 Zinken, J. 176

(Applications of Cognitive Linguistics, 19) Honesto Herrera Soler - Michael White-Metaphor and Mills - Figurative Language in Business and Economics-De Gruyter Mouton (2012) PDF

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

(Applications of Cognitive Linguistics, 19) Honesto Herrera Soler - Michael White-Metaphor and Mills - Figurative Language in Business and Economics-De Gruyter Mouton (2012) PDF

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Metaphor and Mills

Applications of Cognitive Linguistics

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

쑔 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

List of contributors vii

Metaphor and Mills: Figurative language in business and economics.

From barter to coin: Shifting cognitive frames in Classical Greek economy 27

Metaphor and economic thought: A historical perspective 49

Towards a better understanding of metaphorical networks in the language

Metaphors of the Brazilian Economy from 1964 to 2010 103

Mandarin translation of English economic metaphors: A cross-linguistic

Translating metaphor in business/economics dictionary articles:

The use of verbal and gestural metaphor in explanations of management

“Bigger, a lot bigger, massively much bigger”: A comparative study

The perfect storm: An imperfect metaphor 225

Framing a bank: Reputation management during ﬁnancial crises 243

Metaphor and knowledge specialization in business management:

Metaphor as an instrument of linguistic and social identity

Subject index 321

Tony Berber Sardinha Philip Eubanks

Hana Blazkova Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera

Belinda Crawford Camiciotttoli Honesto Herrera-Soler

Lise-Lotte Holmgreen Hanna Skorczynska

Honesto Herrera-Soler and Michael White

3. Crawford Camiciottoli (2007:1) puts it as follows: [B]usiness education has moved to

those analogies. Thus, the hypothetical measures contemplated by economic

2.1. Metaphor in economic theory and in economics as an academic

3.1. Cultural ﬁlters in Contrastive Studies

prevail and on the degree of difﬁculty esp Mandarin-English learners have to

changes in accordance with the professional and linguistic backgrounds of the

hyperbole is more typically associated with message-oriented lectures than with

4.1. Metaphor in the Economy and Business in practice

Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A., Marisol Velasco-Sacristán, Ana Arribas-Baño and Eva

Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco and Lorena Pérez Hernández

Paloma Tejada Caller and Antonio Guzmán Guerra

1. Introduction and aim of the contribution

2. Corpus and Methodology

A corpus of fourteen, richly polysemous sixth century bc Greek words, whose

GREEK Homer 6th c b.C. 5th–4th c. bC 3rd BC –4th AD Hellenistic- Later

current usage, custom. Name of a coin

GREEK Homer 6th c b.C. 5th–4th c. bC 3rd BC –4th AD Hellenistic- Later

animals Produce of money lent, hence

GREEK MEANING ( S ) TESTIMONIES CENTURY LITERARY

Argýrion 1. Small coin 1. Aristophanes, Frogs/Aves/ 1. 5th bc/4th bc 1. Comedy/History

Árgyros 1. Silver 1. Herodotus/Thucydides/Plato, Al- 1. 5th bc./5ht bc/5th bc 1. History/

Chalcós 1. Copper 1. Homer, Iliad 1. 8th bc (already 1. Epic

Chréma 1. Need 1. Xenophon, Oeconom. 1. 4ht bc 1. History

2. Golden armour or raiment 2. Homer, Iliad 2. 8th bc 2. Epic

GREEK MEANING ( S ) TESTIMONIES CENTURY LITERARY

2.Used both as a weight and a 2. Aristophanes, Nub. 2. 5th bc. 2. Comedy

GREEK MEANING ( S ) TESTIMONIES CENTURY LITERARY

7. Money changer’s counter Demosth. 9. 4th bc 8. Oratory

pensation4 . Furthermore, it must be mentioned that compensation seems to be

moves on to refer to ‘anything sanctioned by current use’, ‘custom’ and ‘legal

gressively abstract senses of words would represent the emergence of a new

The present contribution illustrates that a detailed analysis of linguistic issues

16. See http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/puffert.path.dependence. The concept of self-

ineluctably linked to that of myth and preciousness. Thus, value is conceived of

Nicolaas T.O. Mouton

“Economic conditions are constantly changing,” observed Alfred Marshall at the

1. Marshall is occasionally portrayed as a persistent opponent of Historismus, yet he

Modern commentaries on Marshall’s “economic biology” tend to concentrate