The Dynamic Efficiency of Cognitive Metaphors in Economic Discourse: from The Language of Economy to the Economy of Language

Recent research has intensely focused on the close relationship between Language and Economics (Rubinstein 2000). The relationship has been investigated both in terms of Language of Economics and in terms of Economics of Language: the former includes the whole of features which characterize the economic domain and sub-domains at linguistic level, (e.g. nominalization, metaphors and other rhetorical tropes, terminology, text types and genres), while the latter refers to the study of language from an economic perspective, also involving a way of telling a story through implicit and explicit references to other stories, which may be, or may be not, shared by other participants (Baker 2013). A major role in this bi-directional relationship between Economy and Language is played by cognitive metaphor and other rhetorical tropes, which “shape the conceptual structure of our language.” (Rojo et al. 2013: 12), including our view of economy. In this paper, we adopt a dynamic perspective to investigate economic metaphors; by dynamic perspective, we mean an approach that entails a study of metaphors in their actual context of use, where social, cognitive and affective processes interact. It implies a rejection of the standard theories of cognition based on abstract and amodal representations of entities, events and processes, which ignore human interventions and the space and time context. More specifically, we investigate how the economic theory of dynamic efficiency, i.e. “the capacity of an economic system to stimulate entrepreneurial creativity and coordination” (Huerta de Soto 2009: 29) may apply to the study of economic metaphors, especially those associated with the concepts of movement, progress, creativity, ingenuity, long-term innovation, which, figuratively, represent the ever changing situations affecting the global market in the face of the outburst of financial crises. Methodologically, our study is based on cognitive linguistics (Evans and Green 2006), Resche’s study of economic metaphors (Resche 2013), recent contributions from corpus cognitive linguistics (Arppe et al. 2010; Gries 2012), as well as Jenkins’s principles of transmedia storytelling, in particular continuity, worldbuilding, subjectivity and performance. We show how events and concepts related to the 2008 financial crisis are constructed and explained metaphorically through the dynamic interplay of different media, in particular movies, fiction, comics, video-tutorials.