Conceptual Metaphors And Brexit: A Preliminary Study

Much has been written about the complex and secluded world of the metaphor, albeit the study of the power of the conceptual metaphor as a persuasion tool behind the shadows of certain socio-political and economic interests is still a partially unexplored world. Hence, this paper aims to study the conceptual metaphor in financial press articles. In the interests of carrying out such purpose, this empirical study stems from the analysis, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, of the typology and connotation (positive or negative) of the conceptual metaphors used, as well as establish a longitudinal study of the use of both positive and negative metaphors in the 3 months prior to Brexit day vote. To do this, a corpus based on 15 articles retrieved from the prestigious British financial journal The Economist has been compiled. In addition, in order to carry out a comparative analysis of the discourse, a corpus-based study pertaining to the same journal (Rojo and Orts, 2008) has been used. Findings suggest that the connotation in the use of metaphors is strongly influenced by the proximity of the Brexit vote day. Likewise, data also revealed that sociopolitical context plays a fundamental role as far as the use of different typology of metaphor is concerned.