Readership and Purpose in the Choice of Economics Metaphors

Abstract

The findings described in this article suggest that writers' choices of linguistic metaphors are importantly influenced by 2 factors: the text's intended readership and its purpose.We describe a corpus comparison of metaphor use in scientific and popular business discourse. Frequency measures and concordancing techniques were used to identify the differences in metaphorical use between the 2 corpora. A narrower range of metaphors was found in the scientific business corpus than in the popular business corpus. Functions of the genre-specific metaphors in each corpus were then examined using a framework based on work by Henderson (1986), Lindstromberg (1991), and Goatly (1997). Despite their having related subject matter, the 2 corpora shared relatively few linguistic metaphors, and metaphors appeared to be used for a different range of functions in each corpus.