Metaphor in specialised economics texts: the case of Romanian central bank reports

Abstract

The present study focuses on a less analyzed use of metaphor in specialized languages, namely, on the presence of free metaphors in professional specialized texts. The type of text accounting for the corpus of the analysis is represented by the central bank report. As regards the theoretical framework, we have considered best appropriate the contributions of cognitive theories on metaphor and, on the other hand, the terminological approach to metaphor. The research has revealed a limited use of metaphors directly related to a discourse genre relying on accuracy, denotation and factual data support. Free metaphors, meaning non lexicalized expressions, tend to repeat in more or less similar contexts. The dominant types of occurring in the corpus include change of state, orientational and measurement metaphors. The article describes the conceptual patterns and their influence at the level of linguistic expressions, the nature of the source domains and the relation between metaphor's function and the type of discourse analysed.