When bank stocks are hobbled by worries : a metaphor study of emotions in the financial news reports

Janet HO*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)295-317
Number of pages23
JournalText and Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies
Volume36
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2016

Keywords

  • corpus linguistics
  • financial crisis
  • metaphor
  • negative emotion
  • news discourse

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