The role of metaphors in financial texts

Abstract

Language used by financial analysts and journalists, in texts such as news articles, official reports and in-depth analyses, is suffused with instances of figurative speech, ranging from metaphor to marketing spins. A computer based information system which is to be applied in the financial domain should be endowed with some sense of the metaphors which are characteristic of its language. We report the analysis of a corpora of financial texts, which we hope will pave the way for the development of an electronic lexical resource to enrich an Information Retrieval system, through the utilisation of the metaphoric phenomena of financial discourse. The results presented demonstrate the widespread use of metaphor in financial texts and begin to characterise their distribution by way of a grouping according to the theme of verticality.

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