Exploring the Knowledge of Conceptual Metaphors for Economic Recovery in Stock Market Reports in the Nigerian Businessday Newspapers

Abstract

Metaphors play a significant role towards delineating how business and financial events operate and influence peoples’ understanding. This study aimed to investigate the use of linguistic metaphors in describing the Nigerian stock market in Nigerian Businessday newspapers. The study intended to identify the linguistic metaphors used to describe the movements and condition of the Nigerian stock market and to analyze the conceptual patterns of the metaphors manifested in the stock market reports of the Nigerian Businessday newspapers. Qualitative approach was employed in the research and the data analysis was based on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor analytic framework and the two major models related to metaphor categorisation and analysis proposed by Lara (2008). The findings from the study revealed that the conceptual pattern Economy/Market are PEOPLE, Economy/Market are COMPETITION/GAME, and The Economy/Market are FIGHT/BATTLE are the most dominant in the corpus of the Nigerian Businessday newspapers. The findings also demonstrate that from the three taxonomies, the Great Chain of Being has the most striking data in the three corpora and the metaphoric term ‘growth’ has the highest frequency.