Metaphor in Economics
Economic communication uses metaphor to describe processes, explain difficulty and present possible futures. An edited collection by José Mateo and Francisco Yus brings together research on financial language and other specialised discourse, including company reports, business students' writing and financial blogs.[1]
Money looks at expressions involving financial resources, liquidity and flow. This page focuses on how metaphor can organise a description of a company or an economy, and how researchers investigate that language.
Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Antonio Moreno-Sandoval examined 50 Spanish letters to shareholders, totalling 50,291 words, from loss-making IBEX companies over 2014–2017. They retrieved the letters from the FinT-esp financial corpus, read and annotated the metaphors, and examined their proposed rhetorical functions. War or army and health or fitness were the most frequent domains in their analysis.[2]
The authors interpret the war language as presenting companies as organised and resilient in adversity. They analyse health language through a sequence of illness or damage, diagnosis, treatment and recovery. Their argument is that these descriptions help present losses as a manageable phase with an anticipated improvement.[2]
That is an interpretation of the letters' persuasive design. The study did not experimentally measure how the letters changed investors' beliefs or decisions. Its sample was also selected for losses; it does not establish the frequency of those metaphors in all corporate reporting.[2]
Comparing possible descriptions
The following sentences are invented examples, not quotations from company reports and not descriptions of an actual economy.
| Example | What the image makes available | A question for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| “The company is recovering.” | A condition that can worsen or improve over time. | What counts as recovery, and whose assessment establishes it? |
| “We are defending our position.” | A location to hold against an opposing force. | Who is positioned as an opponent, and what alternatives are left outside this description? |
| “The plan will put us back on course.” | Direction, deviation and a projected destination. | Who set the destination, and what evidence supports the proposed route? |
| “The economy needs more fuel.” | An operating system supplied with something that keeps it moving. | What does fuel stand for here, and what mechanisms are being assumed? |
A metaphor offers a way to organise a claim. Assessing that claim still requires the surrounding explanation and evidence. For example, a recovery image may link a current loss to a future improvement without specifying the timescale or the measure of improvement.
Studying framing and reception
An analysis can distinguish the words that occur, the interpretation proposed by the analyst, and the response of an audience. The shareholder-letter chapter supplies contextual examples and corpus analysis. Experiments discussed in Metaphor and Reasoning illustrate a different approach: comparing responses under specified conditions. Those experiments concern their own topics and do not supply missing evidence about the readers of these financial letters.
For a practical comparison of two reports, retain each expression with its paragraph, author or organisation, date and intended audience. Examine both the image and the factual claim it accompanies. Metaphor Identification and Corpus Research explains why finding a word and classifying its use are separate steps.
Related pages
- Money
- Metaphor and Reasoning
- Metaphor Across Languages and Cultures
- Metaphor Identification and Corpus Research
- Metaphor Research Library
Sources
- ↑ José Mateo and Francisco Yus, editors (2021), Metaphor in Economics and Specialised Discourse. Peter Lang. Free complete book.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Antonio Moreno-Sandoval (2021), “War and health metaphors in financial discourse: The case of ‘Letter to Shareholders’ in annual reports”, in Mateo and Yus, Metaphor in Economics and Specialised Discourse, pp. 41–72, especially pp. 43–44 and 65–66.