War and health metaphors in financial discourse: the case of "Letter to Shareholders" in annual reports

• Vargas-Sierra, Chelo ^[1] ; Moreno-Sandoval, Antonio
  1. [1] Universitat d'Alacant

     Universitat d'Alacant

     Alicante, España

     
• Localización: Metaphor in economics and specialised discourse / coord. por José Mateo Martínez, Francisco Yus Ramos, 2021, ISBN 978-3-0343-4048-9, págs. 41-71
• Idioma: inglés
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  • This study investigates the metaphorical expressions within the fields of health and war in a corpus of Letters to Shareholders (henceforth LTS) in Spanish compiled within the FinT- esp project (Moreno- Sandoval et al. 2020). From this LTS corpus, we built a subcorpus comprising the LTS by loss- making companies to identify how these companies achieve persuasion by using key metaphors. Our study uses quantitative and qualitative data to identify and analyse metaphors retrieved from LST subcorpus. For metaphors to be identified, we adopted a “reading- and- tagging approach” following the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group 2007). Every identified metaphor was tagged with a corpus annotation tool and classified into a key domain underpinned by Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The tagging method allowed us to obtain quantitative data of the key metaphors used. For a metaphor qualitative analysis, we used the approach called “Critical Metaphor Analysis” (CMA) by Charteris-Black (2004). Our study revolves around two principal axes: the corpus- based methodology used to process metaphorical expressions in our corpus and the analysis on the two most frequent key domains, i.e., war/ army and health/fitness. This paper concludes that metaphorical expressions related to these mentioned domains in loss- making companies are mostly used to show a strong, resilient corporate image, on the path to imminent recovery and with a well-planned strategy to achieve pending success; all in an attempt to downplay the impact of the negative numbers they have registered during the fiscal year.