The Analysis of Metaphorical Business Trends and Causes in The Economist Newsletter

This paper aims to analyze a corpus of 77 business summaries collected between March 2008 and December 2009 from The Economist newsletter. These texts are excellent teaching tools in university Business English courses, due to their brevity, lexical accuracy, and consequent clarity. The aim of the present paper is first of all to analyze how economic and financial trends and causes are lexicalized in these brief texts from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view (Partington A., 1998; Deignan A., 2005). Secondly, the paper tries to demonstrate what type of rationale is applied when trends and markers of causality are used at both phrastic and textual levels. The results showed confirm the presence of many dead metaphors to convey straightforward financial and economic trends, i.e. rise, fall, decline, drop, among others. On the other hand, the use of more sophisticated metaphors, both in the headlines and within the texts, emphasizes the richness and liveliness of such rhetorical tool in business discourse. The present paper also devotes its final part to the analysis of metaphors, being the most common representation of trends in English, both from the point of view of their cognitive elaboration and from the point of view of their lexical and semantic relevance in business discourse