culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS METAPHORS
The practical approach to metaphor study in this paper is based on a
corpus of newspaper and magazine articles (headlines and text) on business
and different economic issues (The Economist, Guardian, Financial Times).
This corpus of newspaper and magazine articles is in fact much larger and it
comprises 20 articles from their internet sites, covering a period of two years,
2002 and 2003.
From a cognitive point of view, metaphors of globalization promote the
linkage of representation of entities, from the real natural and cultural world,
through language and by means of the mental process discovering similarities
and formalizing them in analogies. That is, it has a heuristic function in
discourse. For example, the image of Internet as a metaphor of a globalised
order or the image of the world as a “global village” gives symbolic body to
the globalization. From this interpretation viewpoint, certain semantic fields
chosen as basis for the globalization metaphors involve features characterising
the conceptual matrices of globalisation.
Health and the state of body:
“The fusion and takeover fever changes the global business outlook”
“The global economy is suffering from a slight hangover.”
Personification and movement:
“The US competes in a global market and can’t ignore interest rates in
other countries.”
“Most African companies are seeking to globalize, liberalising trade and
opening the door to foreign investment.”
“The avalanche of information freely available in the global village of
the 21 st century.”
“Archo Chemical went global in the 90s and today deals with Nissan,
Toyota, Honda, Renault, Peugeot and the US car makers.”
Family relationships:
“The global organisation is more like a shortgun marriage.”
“The today wife of WorlCom was formely the sweetheart who had more
suitors than any other in the telecommunications world.”
“Daimler and Chrysler had a baby.”
Erasing boundaries:
“The 90s produced a great change: the barriers of world trade fall and
capitals begin to flow with no consideration for national boundaries.”
“Local entities open up broad highways to integration.”
“World Domination” (headline) etc.
Games and gambling:
“Changing the rules of the game.”
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