Money metaphors in English and Romanian. A Comparative Approach

Abstract

The paper aims to analyse conceptual categories clustered around money metaphors both in English and Romanian. It also explores the differences and similarities arising between the realization of this category of conceptual metaphors in Romanian and English, the mappings between Source Domain and Target Domain, the frequency of money metaphors, as well as the morphological realizations of this conceptual category. We will identify the metaphorical mapping which establishes between source domain and target domain. The first stage before embarking upon analysing and identifying conceptual metaphors is establishing the methods of annotation as well as the targets. Depending on the purpose of the research as well as on the length, the researcher can opt for manual processing or for electronic annotation, feeding the concordancing programs with headwords belonging to source domain and/or target domain. In our investigation we rely on previous research studies dealing with the figurative aspects of business language. The degree of interaction between source domain and target domain will also be mentioned.

Keywords: MetaphorsBusiness EnglishCorpus

1. Introduction

The study of metaphors is approached from two perspectives: the traditional view and the cognitive

linguistic one. The difference between these two perspectives lies in the fact that in the traditional view

one word is used instead of another, while in cognitive linguistic view one conceptual domain is used

instead of another. In traditional view metaphors are seen as linguistic devices used with the purpose of

adorning language. (Kövecses, 2010). Conceptual Metaphor Theory came into picture with the seminal

1 This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation,

CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-2785.

work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) Metaphors we live by and it points out the difference between

cognitive metaphors and linguistic metaphors. In Metaphor. A Practical Introduction Kövecses (2010)

defines conceptual metaphors as follows:

A conceptual metaphor consists of two conceptual domains, in which one domain is

understood in terms of another. A conceptual domain is any coherent organization of

experience. The two domains that participate in conceptual metaphor have special

names. The conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions to

understand another conceptual domain is called source domain , while the conceptual

domain that is understood this way is the target domain . The target domain is the

domain that we try to understand through the use of the source domain. (Kövecses,

2010, p.4).

Kövecses (2010) clearly explains the difference between linguistic metaphors and conceptual

metaphors, he distinguishes conceptual metaphors from metaphorical linguistic expressions. According to

Kövecses metaphorical linguistic expressions are words, other linguistic expressions that come from the

language or terminology of the more concrete conceptual domain (i.e., domain B). (Kövecses, 2010. p.4).

Kövecses considers that the principle of motivation characterizes the cognitive linguistic view, while

predictability characterizes the traditional view of metaphor.

2. Literature review

Money metaphors have aroused linguists`interest. A comprehensive study of money approached

from a diachronic perspective was conducted by Tejada Caller and Guerra (2012), it analyses the way

money was perceived in classical Greek period 8th century BC- 6th century BC. The authors study the

way monetary vocabulary was perceived, i.e. in terms of wealth, value, means of exchange. The research

is based on corpus, the authors analyse Greek words which have meanings of coins and developed a clear

economic sense. Diachronically monetary vocabulary is referred to as means of exchange and the lexical

realizations are based on metonymy: utensils and substances for exchange, object for substance, object for

activity. The authors outline the following aspects: on the one hand the transformation of Greek

vocabulary which goes hand in hand with lexical development and enrichment and on the other hand the

cultural implications. From a lexical point of view the authors see an evolution from money seen as a

means of exchange to money seen as profit. The authors tried to reconstruct the cognitive models

associated with the concept of exchange with the help of interactional and habitual forms of behaviour

and with the help of vocabulary. The authors dwell on the idea that linguistic research is a useful tool in

discovering different stages of a country`s language and behaviour. The frame of material exchanges

shows a social and emotional perception of money, money gets mobile and countable, the ancient static

system turns dynamic, wealth becomes transactionable.

Mouton (2012) also draws on the historical perspective in the study of money metaphors. In the

sub-chapter Medieval conceptions of money , the author identifies a series of mappings money and blood

in order to show how specific economic organs fit into the social body. In his opinion metaphors

underlying economic reasoning should be seen as flexible and dynamic processes rather than fixed static

systems. Mouton (2012) mentions researchers who find mappings between blood and money.Spencer

(1891, as cited in Mouton, 2012, p. 52) sees societies in terms of organisms, the lack of money in

primitive societies is analogous to the lack of blood in simple organisms.

In her study Towards a better understanding of metaphorical networks in the language of

economics: The importance of theory-constitutive metaphors, Resche (2012) dwells on economic and

business metaphors. She believes that liquid metaphors are fully exploited when dealing with money.

Resche (2012) identifies and analyses the metaphorical networks of the European monetary union before

the Euro was born as a marriage, a journey, a club, a construction, religion, a guest, transport, a building.

All these metaphorical branches share a common denominator: personification.

3. Research Methodology

Conceptual metaphors can be explored either by resorting to the lexical approach, advocated by

Zoltán Kövecses or by relying on corpus. The methodology we resort to is corpus-based, as we start from

the assumption that nowadays almost every attempt to study business metaphors is approached from a

corpus perspective. Corpora represent efficient tools in discovering and revealing linguistic metaphors,

they can facilitate both synchronic and diachronic study of metaphors. Arguments for resorting to corpora

include: they enable researchers to conduct quantitative analysis of conceptual metaphors, they draw on

the frequency of conceptual metaphors within a type of text or discourse, they open new avenues in the

study of conceptual metaphors. Consequently, a large number of linguists adhered to corpora in studying

business metaphors. In the following lines we will look at two different methods in the study of

conceptual metaphors: the lexical approach and the corpus-based one.

Zoltán Kövecses who advocates the lexical approach in the study of conceptual metaphors is of the

opinion that corpus linguistics can bring advances in the study of most common source domains and

target domains. The author believes that corpus linguistics which can give a better picture of all events

and actions and which he describes it as”a remarkable new tool in the study of metaphors that as far as I

can tell, mostly confirms but also often challenges and requires us to modify the findings of conceptual

metaphor theory”. (Kövecses, 2010, p.27).

For conducting a corpus-based analysis the researcher has to compile a corpus, establish the

concordancing program to be used, insert headwords in the concordancing programs, identify, interpret

and analyze the findings. The population of texts comprising the corpus depends on the purpose of the

analysis. This method is very efficient in analysing long texts, it also has the advantage that larger

categories of data can be processed and analysed. This method is promoted and adopted by Stefanowitsch

2006, Koller 2006, Deignan 2008. According to Anatol Stefanowitsch target domain can be investigated

with the help of key words-based method, he believes that this search can be fruitfully applied in the case

of target domains like economics. (Stefanowitsch, 2006a, p.3).

Stefanowitsch (2006) compares the two approaches in the investigation of conceptual metaphors,

namely the text-based analysis promoted by Zoltán Kövecses which deals with the ideological, social,

communicative and cultural functions of metaphors and the corpus-based method and he concludes by

saying that corpora open new vistas in investigating conceptual metaphors.

For our analysis we adopted the following methodology: we incorporated two parallel corpora,

one in English and another one in Romanian, both having the same structure and comprising similar

population of texts. The use of parallel corpora enables us to compare findings in English and Romanian,

as well as to analyse similarities and differences. The two corpora comprise 600,000 words each and they

were populated with business English and Romanian business texts retrieved from daily British and

Romanian newspapers (The Economist, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, Ziarul

Financiar, Capital, Adevarul financiar, Business Magazine). The time span for selecting the articles runs

for the duration of two years from 2013 to 2015. The articles from specialized and general newspapers

were selected at random from business/ economic section, financial, business, money, banking sections,

covering a large array of economic topics.

We resorted to the following methods of extracting conceptual metaphors from the corpus:

1. Manual annotation using the MIP method;

2. Automated annotation using the corpus-based approach. Automatic annotation was achieved in two

ways: a. searching for target domain; b. searching for source domain.

We will refer briefly to the advantages and disadvantages these two methods provide.The MIP method

(Metaphor Identification Procedure) for identifying conceptual metaphors was devised by the Pragglejaz

Group of linguists. This method can be successfully applied on small texts (Kövecses, 2010), it entails the

examination of the contextual meanings of the lexical units comprising the text and it enables researchers

to identify various metaphoric expressions. MIP is advocated by Zoltán Kövecses who points out the fact

that conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as target and a more concrete or

physical concept as their source (Kövecses, 2010, p.7). Before identifying conceptual metaphors Zoltán

Kövecses suggests we need to know which linguistic metaphors point to their existence, we need to

distinguish linguistic metaphors from unmetaphorical (literal) linguistic items (Kövecses, 2010, p.4-5).

Manual annotation comprises several stages: identification of the metaphoric expressions, establishing the

source domain and target domain and identifying the entailments establishing between source domain and

target domain. The main disadvantage of manual annotation is that it is time-consuming and it limits the

size of the corpus, on the other hand it has the advantage that this type of annotation enables the

researcher to search for source domain and target domain vocabulary.

Automatic annotation relies on extraction from a corpus annotated for semantic fields, the

researcher can search for all lexical items belonging to a source domain. Our annotation consists of

inserting headwords clustered around the semantic field of money and cash and we can extend them to

profit, deposit, futures as well as their Romanian equivalents. The findings of automatic annotations were

then manually processed in order to identify the metaphorical uses of money.

We embrace the keywords-based method proposed by Stefanowitsch (2006), who suggests that we

choose a lexical item referring to the target domain under investigation and extract its occurrences from

the corpus. For our investigation, however, we opted for a combination of the two methods on the one

hand because the corpus-based approach identifies the general metaphors and on the other hand because

manual processing of the text is necessary in order to see the entailments between source domain and

target domain.

4. Findings and results

The corpus-based approach enables us to draw on the frequency of headwords which may point to

the existence of conceptual metaphors. In the English corpus we identified 400 hits of money, however

not all the uses of money are connected with conceptual metaphors. The general idea pervading the texts

comprising both corpora is that money is an important aspect of contemporary economy, it is the engine

that drives a country`s economy. Money is seen as a valuable possession which must be well-managed

and taken care of, the owner must avoid putting money at risk. In comparison with conceptualisation of

money as identified and analysed by Tejada Caller and Guerra (2012) we may see that nowadays money

still maintains the conceptualisation of wealth, value, assets, profit. The Romanian corpus abound in the

uses of money seen as a very valuable resource.

The noun money mostly collocates with the following verbs: to make, to collect, to allocate, to

invest, to create, to manage . The same collocational patterning is maintained in the Romanian corpus, a

obține , a investi , a face , a câștiga , a stoarce bani. The most common conceptual metaphors are:

5. Conclusions

The manual and automatic annotation of the corpus leads us to the conclusion that a manual

processing of the text is more accurate, more comprehensive and yields more results in comparison with

the corpus-based one. It also enables the identification of a higher number of conceptual metaphors. Due

to the length of the corpora we had to resort to both types of annotation.

In terms of frequencty the English occurrences of money and its semantic field outnumber the

ones in the Romanian corpus, on the other hand the use of money in the English corpus highlights a more

positive overtone, while in the Romanian corpus negative connotations of money occur more often. The

second headword we searched for cash and its Romanian equivalent yields more hits in the English

corpus in comparison with the Romanian one. None of the hits containing the word numerar highlights

the existence of conceptual metaphors. Moreover, we identified the same metaphor created by the same

journalist ocurring two times in the Romanian corpus, which points again to the conventionality of

Romanian journalists.

Not all money and money-related conceptual metaphors explicitly comprise the word money or its

Romanian equivalent bani, or other words from the semantic field of money. Such metaphors are difficult

to identify with the help of concordancing programs. The metaphors identified by us pinpoint the

figurative load of business and economic genre, the English corpus is more laden with figurative and

metaphorical uses of money than the Romanian corpus. We may assume that the journalists` capacity of

coining new metaphors is in close connection with the three levels of metaphors as identified by

Kovecses (2010, p.307), mainly with the individual and supraindividual levels which highlight that the

British journalists master a higher creativity and have a capacity of creating more dynamic metaphors

compared to Romanian journalists who resort to conventional metaphors. The figurative uses have a

deeper load in the English corpus in comparison with the Romanian one, bearing the influence of context,

culture, political and historical environments.

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