Metaphorical codes in structuring national economic discourse

摘要

Within the framework of Lakoff and Johnson cognitive theory (2003. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), we explore the use of metaphor in the English and Russian economic discourses as the means to create a metaphorical field, comprising culture-specific and universally shared cognitive blends. We apply the cognitive and comparative analyses to metaphor, which shapes the Economy concept as a cultural code in a corpus of economic texts from English and Russian press. The approach helps to reveal the associative links between source and target domains within metaphorical mappings. Thus, metaphors ECONOMY IS A ROAD, ECONOMY IS AN ANIMAL, ECONOMY IS A DISEASE, ECONOMY IS FOOD, and ECONOMY IS A MECHANISM are common for both languages. For the English language, unique, culturally determined metaphors are ECONOMY IS FIRE and ECONOMY IS STORM, whereas for the Russian language, they are ECONOMY IS THE BOTTOM and ECONOMY IS CLIMATE. Therefore, metaphorical codes in a given language account for risks, opportunities and uncertainties of systematically different economies through multicultural discourse interpretation.