Ontological Metaphor in Economic News Reports: A Pragmatic Approach

Abstract

With the development of the world of economy, economic reports in journals, magazines or news websites have become an essential part of daily life. Economic news demonstrates rigid and abstract concepts and meanings. It is a truism that clarity is as important as accuracy. However, writers of such news should not stick only to formal language. Their words would sound boring. To keep the audience interested, figurative language is manipulated. One rhetorical device frequently used in this genre is metaphor. It sheds some colorings on the rigid language of finance and economics. Thus, it deserves an investigatory research work. This paper sets itself the task of exploring one particular kind of metaphor, i.e. ontological metaphor. It aims at pragmatically exploring its kinds that can be possibly utilized in economic news reports. This involves specifying the most prevalent kind of ontological metaphor. It is hypothesized that in such a kind of news, ontological metaphorical uses show different manifestations like metonymy, personification or hyperbole. However, it is assumed that metonymy is the most prevailing one. The data chosen for the analysis are randomly taken from different economic websites and are analyzed by means of a model developed by this study. The analysis is quantitatively supported by a statistical analysis conducted via the percentage equation. The most significant findings of the analyses vindicate the two hypotheses set above. This paper is hoped to be valuable to pragmaticians and economic news writers or journalists who should be aware of such rhetorical devices to make use of them. Introduction Economy is closely related to human beings, their lives and their societies. As one crucial aspect in people's lives and daily transactions, care in economic news is highly valued and coped with. News of businesses, markets, stocks, investments and the like, which are all covered under the broad macro term of economic news here, is of interest to different kinds of people. It is argued that this genre exhibits metaphoric uses of language to soften its abstractness (White, 2003: 133). Metaphor as a rhetorical figure of speech is used to express one thing in terms of another. Different views and theories have dealt with metaphor. This paper, however, approaches metaphor pragmatically utilizing Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) conceptual theory of metaphor with its structural, orientational and ontological types. It is claimed that cognition and language are never separated as the way we think is metaphorical in nature. This paper focuses on ontological metaphors and seek answers for the following two questions: What are the possible types of ontological metaphor which characterize economic news reports? What is the most dominant type in the context under study? In association with these aims, it is hypothesized that ontological metaphor pragmatically manifests itself in different guises such as metonymy, personification, and hyperbole. Nevertheless, it is expected that the most frequently appealed to is metonymy. To achieve the aims of the study and verify or reject its hypotheses, two kinds of analyses are carried out: pragmatic and statistical ones. The former is done by means of a model developed for this purpose while the latter, which is intended to quantitatively support the findings of the pragmatic analysis, is performed by means of the percentage equation.