THE FINANCIAL LANGUAGE USED TO COMMUNICATE THE SAME SOCIO-ECONOMIC EVENTS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH PRESS THROUGH METAPHORS AND METONYMIES

This paper analyses the financial language used to communicate recent socioeconomic events affecting the global economy. To this end, two corpora have been selected, one in English and one in Spanish, consisting of 60 financial press articles concerning the uprisings which occurred during the Arab Spring in the Middle East from 2011 to 2014. The Lakoffian semantics analysis will be used to study the communication of this topic focusing on metaphors and metonymies. The study of these features between both corpora allowed the authors to show how the same events are described by financial press articles of different countries and languages at the same points of time. The results show that there are differences both in the frequency of use and the types of metaphors and metonymies in the English and the Spanish corpora. These findings may provide ESP learners with a useful tool to understand financial texts, improve metaphoric and metonymical competence and realise the importance of culture in the conceptualisation of a particular topic.