Psychological Metaphors In English And Romanian Economic Discourse: A Comparative Study

This article analyses the language of business and economics in English and Romanian through the lens provided by conceptual metaphor. The focus of the paper is on the way in which various human moods, emotions, and personality traits are attributed to markets, business organizations, or the economy at large, and the way in which this conceptualization of the economic and business environment is realized linguistically by means of metaphorical expressions from the semantic field of human psychology. While markets and the economy seem to be dominated by moods and emotions such as optimism, satisfaction, relief, or, on the contrary, pessimism, nervousness, worry, distress, even misery and depression, companies and their products are generally presented as persons endowed with qualities such as efficiency, intelligence, fairness, and reliability. These psychological metaphors are found at a general level in both English and Romanian, but their particular lexical realizations in the two languages do not always coincide. Moreover, English seems to show a slightly stronger preference for the employment of metaphors than Romanian, as evident both in dictionaries and, to a lesser extent, in the business press.