JoLIE 9:1/2016
CONCEPTUALISATION OF COMPANIES IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN BUSINESS JOURNALESE [1]
Teodora Popescu
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
Abstract
The aim of this article is to identify and analyse conceptual metaphors of “company” found in Romanian and British journalese. The analysis framework for this investigation is based both on a pragma-linguistic approach, and on the cognitive metaphor theory, as well as on anthropological theories of cultural categories. Traditionally, though rather antagonistically, companies are regarded both as lifeless “machines”, over which mechanistic control may be exerted, and as “living organisms”, and derived from the latter, as “systems of change”: a “lethargic” company may be transformed into an investor. The analysis is carried out on two corpora (British and Romanian), consisting of articles from general audience and financial broadsheets, written during 2002-2015, i.e.: The Economist, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Telegraph for the British corpus; and Adevărul, Adevărul financiar, Jurnalul Naţional, Cotidianul, Capital, and Ziarul financiar for the Romanian corpus. As a conclusion, it appears that conceptualisations of companies are rather similar in the two corpora, with differences assignable to cultural, social or historical differences.
Key words: Business metaphors; Concordancers; Corpus-based approach; Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT); Conceptualisation of company; Cultural variation; Business journalese.
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How to cite this article: Popescu, T. (2016). Conceptualisation of companies in English and Romanian business journalese. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 9(1), 89-110. DOI: https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2016.9.1.7
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[1] This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-2785.