Central Banking as “Fluid Dynamics”: A Comparative Study of English and Japanese Metaphors of Money

This paper reports on a preliminary corpus-based comparative study of metaphorsin English and Japanese in the domain of “monetary policy” by central banks. Inparticular, the study examines how the notion of money is conceptualized in thetwo different languages through various metaphors. The underlying frameworkadopted for the study is Conceptual Metaphor Theory, one of the theoreticallinchpins of Cognitive Linguistics widely employed to examine how figurativeuse of language reflects the metaphorical nature of the human conceptualstructure. Using small corpora garnered in the print media, the study shows howcentral banking is conceptualized as “fluid dynamics” in metaphorical terms, bothin English and Japanese, but also investigates some salient differences in thesurface realizations of such conceptual metaphors of money between the twolanguages