Metaphorical patterns and ideology in economic and financial discourse

This paper illustrates the results of a research carried out on the terms and concepts which became widespread during the 2008 financial crisis. More precisely, the purpose of the paper is to assess how and to what extent the ideological stances that emerge from the linguistic analysis of the frame and situational context of these terms and the way in which they are textually construed reflect the socio-economic and historical background of the early 2000s, i.e. the years before, during and after the crisis. Special attention is paid to the discussion of the linguistic devices, e.g. metaphorical expressions, that are used to express ideology overtly or covertly. To achieve this goal, our study is carried out on a set of corpora consisting of texts published between 2004 and 2019. Some corpora are available online, others have been compiled for the purpose of the present research. Using an approach which draws upon cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and, in part, critical metaphor analysis, the analysis of some terms, expressions and their metaphorical meaning shows the rise and fall of the neoliberal ideology in the wake of the 2008 subprime crisis.