Lexicographical Aspects of Health Metaphors in Financial Text

The frequent use of metaphor is an all-pervasive characteristic of the native languages of all civilisations and cultures. This implies that metaphors can be readily identified as such throughout the myriad of genres fashioned and developed by the very large number of distinct discourse communities to be found within human society. However, there are two very distinct types of metaphor: firstly, metaphors chosen by skilful writers who consciously wish to embellish their text by the use of deliberate ornamentation; and secondly, metaphors which hardly, ifat all, impinge on the writer's consciousness because they are so deeply rooted in the human psyche that they are actually needed to give primary linguistic form to people's thoughts, even within frames of professional reference. This paper treats the latter type of metaphor, illustrating the way in which themes in financial discourse are very often articulated via an appeal to the concept of health and its vocabulary. Some questions are posed with respect to the lexicographic treatment of conventional primary meta­ phor and grammatical metaphor. Most often and most traditionally, metaphor is held to be an ornament or adornment of cultured discourse of the sort perhaps best represented by belles lettres, notably poetry. This deliberate, even contrived ornamenta­ tion is intended and is generally felt to be principally aesthetic: it arises via an imaginative associativity of thought which temporarily imparts or is strained to impart a new contextual and non-literal meaning to a "pre­ existing" vocabulary item in a fixed context. The Collins Cobuild Dic­ tionary defines metaphor thus: a metaphor is an imaginative way of describing something by referring to something else which has the qualities you are trying to express. A cluster of questions hence arises but remains predominantly within the field of literary studies: what is conscious metaphor, what metaphors are there, what is a dead metaphor and why do metaphors exist and what are they for anyway? However, there is a functionally more important and mysterious manifestation of metaphor: metaphorical usage we are barely conscious of because we are totally inured to it. Outside the strictly literary frame of reference the study of metaphors of this second type owes an enormous debt in modern times to the pioneering achievement of Lakoff and Johnson who posit the existence of well over a hundred generic,