The Metaphor in Economic Discourse: An Alternative Approach to the Cognitivist Approach

This article advocates the pursuit of a method for the identification and analysis of metaphors in economic discourse which does not have a cognitive linguistic point of departure. It argues that cognitive linguistics strays too far from the linguistic form in its analysis, that its arguments are circular in nature, and that many of its findings are unverifiable and of limited value to the concerns of applied linguistics. An identification and property attribution model of metaphor analysis is suggested instead, which should enable the researcher to identify expressions used metaphorically in discourse on a synchronic level, and exclusively extract the properties which are relevant for the interpretation of the metaphorical expressions in context. This model also allows for the distinction between metaphors privative of the economic discourse and metaphors which pervade language in general.