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Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 6:2 (2016) ► pp.177–204

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The human being as the target of crisis metaphors in English, Spanish and French

 | Complutense University, Madrid
Published online: 20 October 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.6.2.01neg
In 2008 a financial crisis threatened to make economies collapse worldwide. The world entered an era of bank and businesses failures, private defaults and massive layoffs. The crisis became a major topic in the media. The present article sets out to analyse the conceptualization of the crisis in the English, Spanish and French press. I found that journalists relied heavily on metaphorical imagery to describe it. The crisis was conceived in terms of a structured set of conceptual metaphors which depict it as a living organism, a disease, natural disaster, a weather phenomenon and a harmful object. These metaphors not only shape the readers’ view of the crisis, but also construct a negative evaluation of this economic phenomenon by highlighting its harmful effects. The study also shows the commonalities and divergences in the conceptualization of the crisis across languages.
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