Conceptualizing an economic crisis via spatial and movement metaphors: a study across political parties in Lithuania

Abstract

The paper explores how economic crises, being unavoidable and reoccurring at certain periods of time, are metaphorically conceptualized by politicians, who are often considered responsible for them, at least to some extent, and who have power to introduce austerity measures in order to lessen their negative effects and ultimately overcome them. The current study is carried out within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) suggested and developed by Charteris-Black (2005, 2013), Musolff (2004), Hart (2010), etc., which advances the ideas that metaphor plays a significant role in shaping a society and its worldview, that metaphors are an outward manifestation of our mental representations of the social world we live in and that they have ideological and rhetorical implications. To be more precise, this paper primarily analyzes how the economic crisis of 2008 was conceptualized by political parties in Lithuania and how they linguistically expressed the austerity measures taken to resolve the crisis. It focuses on findings regarding the MOVEMENT/SPATIAL metaphor. Moreover, this is a contrastive analysis, which investigates peculiarities and differences of two political groups – the Conservative Party, the party in power at the time of analysis, and the Opposition parties. Specifically, the paper seeks to answer the questions whether there are any quantitative or qualitative differences at the level of linguistic realizations of the MOVEMENT/SPATIAL metaphor in the analyzed discourses and which ideological and rhetorical implications lie behind this metaphor