A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO THE CONCEPTUALISATION OF THE ECONOMY IN BUSINESS ENGLISH PRESS[1]
Maria-Crina Herțeg
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
Abstract
The paper attempts to explore different conceptualisations of economy in British business English press. Our approach is based on corpus, we incorporated a corpus encompassing business articles retrieved from British quality press ranging from 2013 to 2016. In our investigation, we rely on previous research on the figurative aspects pertaining to business discourse.
The conceptual metaphors were identified with the help of concordancing programs, headwords from different source and target domains were inserted in the concordancing program and the findings were manually processed. In certain cases, linguistic metaphors processed with the help of concordancing programs do not necessarily embody conceptual metaphors, these are mainly revealed through manual processing. The findings draw on the fact that figurative uses and conceptual metaphors easily percolate business English discourse. We are aware of the limitations of this research as the study cannot encompass all the categories conceptualising the economy. To this end categories such as economy is war, economy is an animal, economy is a container, economy is a liquid will be the subject of future research.
Key words: Business English press; Conceptual metaphors; corpus; Source domain; Target domain.
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How to cite this article: Herțeg, M.-C. (2019). A corpus-based approach to the conceptualisation of the economy in business English press. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 12(3), 73-97. DOI: https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2019.12.3.5
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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.