Saving the euro – a multimodal analysis of metaphors depicting the Eurozone crisis

Abstract

Much of the research into the topic of financial crises has centered mainly on verbal metaphors whereas visual and multimodal aspects of the phenomenon have remained rather underrepresented. Within the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis pertaining not only to verbal (Charteris-Black & Musolff, 2003; Charteris-Black, 2004) but also to pictorial and multimodal discourse (Forceville, 1996 & 2008; Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009), in this paper we focus on both linguistic and pictorial realisations of the euro currency which pertain to the broader topic of the Eurozone crisis. Closely modelling our methodology on Bounegru and Forceville (2011), we analyse seven covers of the weekly magazine The Economist published in the period 2010-2012 which relate to the Eurozone crisis and belong to the LIQUID and MOVEMENT domains respectively. The purpose of our investigation is to answer the following two questions: (1) how do verbal and visual modes of metaphorical representation contribute to the creation of a particular conceptualisation of the euro currency, and (2) what are some of the evaluative components rendered from the selected multimodal representations? In order to address these questions, we attempt to establish how conceptualisations of the euro are used by the media so as to describe the impact of the Eurozone financial crisis by the use of suggestive pictures accompanied by textual messages and symbols