Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities
Pertanika Journal Home Facebook
Pertanika ยท Universiti Putra Malaysia Press

Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities

Official journal of Universiti Putra Malaysia for scholarly work across the social sciences, humanities and related interdisciplinary fields.

e-ISSN 2231-8534 ISSN 0128-7702
Research Article

Getting Physical with the Market: A Study of Metaphors in the Business Times

Tengku Farah, T. M., Afida, M. A., Rafik-Galea, S. and Zalina, M. K.

KeywordsBusiness English, conceptual metaphor, corpus linguistics, metaphor
Article content

Abstract

This study investigates the metaphorical linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphor, market movements are physical movements, using Charteris-Black and Ennis's (2001) notion of conceptual metaphors. Following a corpus linguistic approach for data collection purposes, it analysed 50 unique Business Times articles randomly identified from a total of 292 articles. An expert within the business context provided expertise in the interpretation of specific types of data derived from the corpus. The findings show that the metaphorical linguistic expressions generally concretise the abstract concept of the economy and market movements and mainly comprise of verbs and nouns. This paper illustrates some of the examples of the relevant metaphorical expressions and discusses how the domain of physical movements helps to structure the domain of market movements. The findings of this study, however, can only be generalised to the samples involved in this study.