Metaphors in the Capital Market

Metaphors in The Capital Market
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Metaphors in The Capital Market
Introduction
The capital market is characterized by the pervasive use of metaphors, particularly when describing financial crises and booms. This predominance in media when describing the world of finance has been attributed to the inherent challenge of conceptualizing what cannot be observed or experienced: metaphors are often employed when something cannot be grasped in its own context (Chung & Ahrens, 2003). The critical fluctuations that happen in capital markets are occurrences of significant abstractness, elusiveness, and intricacy. Just like abstract political objects, movements in the financial markets belong to the domain of entities that can only be conceptualized in a more concrete and familiar way using figurative language (Cheng & Ho, 2015). This phenomenon has been well documented by various researchers with several studies revealing that media coverage of turbulent financial markets often includes the use of metaphors to convey the emotions of investors (Low, 2010). Current literature also indicates that these emotion metaphors often take two forms: agent metaphors and object metaphors.
Agent metaphors tend to anthropomorphize the market by attributing human characteristics to crucial fluctuations while object metaphors portray the market as an inanimate object rocked by outside physical forces. However, while numerous studies have focused on generating an inventory of metaphors in the capital market as well as the linguistic aspects involved, very few studies have investigated the implications of the linguistic expression at the cognitive level. This paper will investigate how the use of metaphors in the capital market reflects people’s perceptions and understanding of asset markets. It theorizes that the use of metaphors in the capital market influences how people experience and conceptualize abstract fluctuations in asset values. The paper will analyze common metaphors in the capital market and compare them with similar plain terms in order to understand the cognitive process of understanding money markets.
Literature Review
The profusion of metaphors in the capital market has been fairly investigated with several studies conducting thorough linguistic analyses of how the press and public imagine and verbalize financial events. For instance, the financial crises in the past two decades spurred numerous studies focusing on the use of metaphors to describe, analyze, and project the financial state and investment environment. However, a majority failed to highlight how metaphors reflect the cognitive process of understanding money markets. For instance, the studies by Eubanks (2000), Chartesis-Black & Musolff (2003), Koller (2006), Skorczynska & Deignan (2006), Fukuda (2009), and Altheide (2015) used the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) framework to analyze the meanings of metaphors in the capital market as they are rooted in discursive activity. The researchers determined that metaphors in the capital market not only conceptualize the emotions of investors but also describe different intensities of negative feelings from anxiety to fear. Other studies used the same framework to investigate the influence of editorial positioning on metaphorical character across different news outlets.
For instance, O’Mara-Shimek et al., (2014) determined that radically positioned newspapers or those seeking to present events in the capital market as newsworthy, tend to use object metaphors while liberally positioned newspapers use animate-biological metaphors to illustrate the need for market intervention. On the whole, existing literature indicates that metaphors in the capital market pre-package investors’ emotions and work to influence people’s understanding of economic events. While the metaphors are not ideological, they elucidate contending epistemological structures from liberal to conservative: this finding is consistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s argument that human beings use metaphors to illustrate their different understandings of the reality surrounding them. A majority of the reviewed studies also supported Lakoff and Johnson’s observation that conceptual metaphors vary across cultural and social experience. For instance, the thesis by Docchio, (2010) determined that a majority of metaphors in the capital market are from masculine domains and reflect the male-dominated capital market.
Methods
The research paper was underpinned by the CMT framework, which was conceived by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980 to describe how metaphors are a matter of both language and thought. Unlike previous classical theories that traditionally defined metaphors as rhetorical or stylistic tools, the CMT framework argues that they are a manifestation of our thoughts. Lakoff and Johnson further assert that metaphors are a critical and indispensable facet of people’s ordinary and conventional manner of understanding the world. Linguistic metaphorical expressions denote the conceptual processes of mapping: the projection of a structure from a source domain to a target domain. The CMT framework provides the necessary tools to understand how the use and selection of metaphors in the capital world influence how people understand financial events. It also allows the researcher to uncover how the narrativizing and naturalizing of these cognitive, ideological, and emotive connotations shape the cognitive process of understanding money markets. The study identified and extracted metaphors from various media texts relating to recent events in the capital market and then compared them with similar plain terms in order to understand the cognitive process of understanding money markets. The media texts relating to recent events in the capital market were extracted from diverse Internet sources.
Analysis & Discussion
Conceptual Metaphors
At the surface level, a large number of articles featured headlines containing agent or object metaphors. For instance, the CNBC articles “Stocks inch lower as rally attempt on Wall Street falters” and “U.S. Treasury yields rise to start the week”, both published on June 21st 2021 contained agent metaphors. They describe events in the capital market as the deliberate actions of a living being. In both examples, movements in the capital market are understood in terms of the actions of an animate thing. By conceptualizing stocks or U.S. Treasury yields as animate objects capable of deliberate actions, readers can easily grasp the abstract fluctuations in the capital market. On the other hand, the article by Seeking Alpha “Why Bitcoin Is Going To Fall Off A Cliff” published on December 1st 2020 as well as the article by Alex Turn...