Inflation Metaphor in the TIME Magazine Corpus

Abstract

A historical perspective on economy metaphor can shed new lights on economic thoughts. Based on the TIME Magazine Corpus (TMC), this paper investigates inflation metaphor over 83 years and compares findings against the economic data over the relatively corresponding period. The results show how inflation, an abstract concept and a normal economic phenomenon, is typically understood and explained in a variety of metaphoric expressions, how different types of metaphor structure and reframe our thinking about inflation, and why the usage of inflation metaphor varied over time. This study highlights the importance of historical perspective and the values of diachronic corpus in researching economy metaphor.