What metaphors tell us about the market: reconciling linguistics, cognition and pragmatics in order to understand the impact of metaphor use on society

Abstract

In the last 25 years, traditional approaches to the treatment of metaphor have been increasingly questioned on both theoretical and experimental grounds and, as a result, Metaphorology has become a flourishing academic discipline and research area. However, the study of the use of metaphor in NZ socio-economic and political discourse remains underdeveloped. We will overview various ways of identifying, researching and categorising metaphors, including the analysis of metaphor in cognitive linguistics (see Gibbs, 2008), in Critical Discourse Analysis (see Musollf, 2012), and in the recent Relevance Theory (Wilson, 2011), the latter shedding new light on the ongoing debates, and suggests fruitful directions for new research. We will then report on the application of an integrated corpus-based approach to an examination of the social impact of metaphors used in texts published in The New Zealand Herald in reference to the condition of the housing market in Auckland. Our study aims to contribute to a fuller picture of genre specific metaphor use in a traditional western newspaper. The analysis applied in the study seeks to unmask the persuasive ideological functions carried and hidden in discourse, the relative social positions of the text producer and the text recipient, and the factors that may influence the recipients’ decoding of the identified metaphors, including the crucial role of context in metaphor creation, interpretation and comprehension. Our findings include lists of metaphors used in the genres under examination and their classification based on latest cognitivist conceptualisations of metaphors.