Metaphor in Times of Crisis: Metaphorical Representations of the Global Crisis in The Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore 2008

This dissertation investigates the metaphorical framing of the global financial/economic crisis in the British and the Italian specialised press, using corpus methodologies, and adopting a two-fold perspective on the data, which combines the theoretical frameworks of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and grammatical metaphor within Systemic Functional Linguistics. Two specialised, comparable corpora were built for the purposes of this study, collecting first page and leading articles from all the 2008 issues of The Financial Times (London edition) and Il Sole 24 Ore. Concordances for the two keywords 'crisis' and 'crisi' were retrieved in sentence format using the online Corpus Query System Sketchengine (www.sketchengine.co.uk), and subsequently analysed for conceptual and grammatical metaphors. Against this theoretical and methodological backdrop, the work explores similarities and differences between the corpora in terms of the classes of conceptual and grammatical metaphor employed in relation to the crisis, and their linguistic realisations. The socio-cultural implications of the use of both types of metaphor, and their connections with register-idiosyncratic features of the language of (financial) journalism, are also discussed. Finally, some advantages of integrating the two theoretical frameworks in the study of metaphor in discourse are highlighted on the basis of corpus evidence.