Inflation Metaphor in the TIME Magazine Corpus

Chunyu Hu,Huijie Liu

doi:10.5539/elt.v9n2p124

Abstract

<p>A historical perspective on economy metaphor can shed new lights on economic thoughts. Based on the TIME Magazine Corpus (TMC), this paper investigates inflation metaphor over 83 years and compares findings against the economic data over the relatively corresponding period. The results show how inflation, an abstract concept and a normal economic phenomenon, is typically understood and explained in a variety of metaphoric expressions, how different types of metaphor structure and reframe our thinking about inflation, and why the usage of inflation metaphor varied over time. This study highlights the importance of historical perspective and the values of diachronic corpus in researching economy metaphor.</p>

Highlights

The importance of inflation in modern economy cannot be overestimated
Based on the TIME Magazine Corpus (TMC), this paper investigates inflation metaphor over 83 years and compares findings against the economic data over the relatively corresponding period
The results show how inflation, an abstract concept and a normal economic phenomenon, is typically understood and explained in a variety of metaphoric expressions, how different types of metaphor structure and reframe our thinking about inflation, and why the usage of inflation metaphor varied over time

Summary

Introduction

The importance of inflation in modern economy cannot be overestimated. The impact of inflation was eloquently expressed by J. M. Keynes (cited in Samuelson & Nordhaus, 2010): “As inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a game and a lottery.”. Whereas economists can gauge inflation by calculating CPI (Consumer Price Index) or GDP Deflator, inflation, as a rather abstract concept, imposes a great challenge for the public. It comes no surprise that most people tend to use metaphors to grasp the difficult-to-understand economic phenomenon

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