Metaphors Of The Crisis - A Reflection Of The Global Financial Situation

This article focuses upon the conceptualisation of the metaphors of the crisis highlighting the variety of both conventional and creative metaphors following their occurrence in the economic articles published in the English weekly journal The Economist over a period of five years (2007-2011) thus covering the American recession from August 2007 to June 2009 and the Euro-zone crisis starting in late 2009. Our intention is to prove that metaphors of the crisis have the power to reflect and influence the global financial situation. In our analysis we shall employ the instruments of cognitive linguistics portraying the targetdomain of the crisis in terms of diverse source-domains be they recurrent such as in the case of medical, military, liquidity or natural disasters metaphors or unexpected as it happens in the so-called miscellaneous category of metaphors of the crisis. Resorting to a qualitative research method this article is meant to offer a bird’s-eye-view upon the problem of the metaphors of the crisis by identifying the most important sourcedomains with the observation that cultural specificity and the speakers’ intentions leave room for further metaphorical elaborations. Last but not least, we aim at paving the way for future comparative studies in the field of cognitive linguistics with the purpose of paralleling English and Romanian linguistic corpora to envisage the similarities and differences between the two.