Abstract
This study is a corpus-based examination of metaphors in the media coverage of the global financial crisis of 2008. Based on conceptual metaphor theory, it discusses how and why metaphors of living thing were used in the news reports, with a particular focus on the two negative emotions of fear and anxiety. The research started with the compilation of a 1-million-word corpus of news articles. With the use of the software suites Wmatrix 2.0 and WordSmith 5.0, metaphors directly conceptualizing the emotions of fear and anxiety were identified. The findings showed that these metaphors described various stages and intensities of negative emotions, and that they were tailored to increase the negative feelings of the readers, which in turn increased the news value of the articles for the newspaper. Various theoretical and lexicogrammatical implications have also arisen from the study.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 295-317 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Text and Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 May 2016 |
Keywords
- corpus linguistics
- financial crisis
- metaphor
- negative emotion
- news discourse