Metaphorical scenarios in business science discourse

Abstract

Metaphor has been shown to play an important role in business science discourse. Yet, previous corpus-based studies only investigated a pre-selected list of metaphoric expressions, potentially rendering the analysis incomplete. Furthermore, some studies which only focused on lexis did not analyse how the lexical items may construct business concepts in terms of scenarios. The purpose of this research is to investigate metaphor used to construct business concepts in business research articles. 42 business research articles published in 2009-2010 from five journals ranked in the top-ten according to the 2007 journal impact factors (Thompson Reuters, 2008) constitute the data of this study. Semantic annotation software USAS (Rayson, 2008) was used to assist in the retrieval of metaphoric expressions. Furthermore, manual analysis of concordances was done to find metaphorical expressions that had not been captured by the semantic tags. The analysis of these metaphoric expressions was based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Metaphor Scenario (Musolff, 2006). Data analysis indicates that metaphor constructs business concepts as scenarios which have participants performing actions to reach their goal according to the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema of the source domains. At the centre of these scenarios, the BOUNDED SPACE source domain serves as a conceptual space or a setting for each scenario. Other source domains, which are WAR, SPORT, GAME, JOURNEY, MACHINE, LIVING ORGANISM, BUILDING and PHYSICAL FORCES, project the scenarios onto the space, forming interconnected and coherent scenarios of business discourse