Inflation Metaphor in Contemporary American English

Abstract

Inflation is often regarded as a dangerous phenomenon which poses a potential threat to economies in the world. It is thus an entity that demands the constant attention of economists, policymakers and the general public. In order to make this abstract entry more concrete and vivid, a number of metaphorical expressions are used to depict inflation. Building on previous studies that relied on researchers’ intuition or a small corpus, this paper sets out to investigate the use of inflation metaphor by examining a 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that there exist a considerable number of metaphorical collocates of inflation, which can be grouped into separate yet closely related categories: INFLATION IS FIRE, INFLATION IS DISEASE, INFLATION IS AN ANIMAL, INFLATION IS AN ENEMY, INFLATION IS A RACER, INFLATION IS A MACHINE, and the like. This study shows how these metaphors function in specific contexts, and how they structure and reframe our thinking about inflation and other related economic concepts. These findings have pedagogical implications for both teaching of economics and second language learning of relevant words and phrases.