A Corpus-Based Analysis of Recurrent Structural Metaphors and Domains in Financial Times

Abstract

The purpose of this undergraduate dissertation is to analyze a corpus extracted from the “Companies and Markets” section of the Financial Times. The focus of the analysis is set in the identification of the most common source domains and target domains in order to identify the most recurrent structural metaphors occurring on financial reporting. The process followed to achieve this was firstly based on the adaptation of a mix of MIP and some features from MIPVU. Next, data obtained were filtered with a value inspired in Charteris-Black, 2004, in order to leave out of the analysis negligible data which may disturb in the results. Thanks to this filter, data became more manageable and closed to the purpose of the research. The results show that there are a total of 7 recurrent source domains and 8 recurrent target domains. As for structural metaphors, the amount of recurrent ones is 8, being MONEY IS AN ORGANISM the one occurring in more occasions. With regard to these results, I have concluded that financial reporting is a rich field in terms of metaphors, and some of the metaphors found are related to other ones which are not related at all with business. An example of this is ECONOMY IS AN ORGANISM, which is related to ABSTRACT COMPLEX SYSTEMS ARE PLANTS.