Metaphors in Newspaper Reports on Nigeria 2005 Banks Recapitalisation

Tolulope Oluremi

doi:10.13092/lo.112.8262

Abstract

This article investigates metaphors in newspaper reports that border on mergers and acquisitions within the 2005 recapitalisation exercise in Nigeria. It considers conceptual metaphors used in depicting mergers and acquisitions among Nigerian banks and how they are deployed by journalists in shaping readers’ perception of the mergers and acquisitions activities. Data for the study comprise thirty purposively sampled articles on recapitalisation published between year 2004 and 2006, in three selected Nigerian newspapers: Business Day, The Punch and ThisDay, which had relevance, wide circulation and adequate reports on economic issues in Nigeria. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory provides the theoretical perspective for the data analysis. The study reveals two conceptual metaphors: MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS AS WAR and MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS AS CONNUBIAL RELATIONS. The metaphors of war influence readers’ perception of the mergers and acquisitions exercise as a corporate management task that is highly indispensable, confrontational and susceptible to aggression considering the appalling state of the Nigeria banking sector and the huge recapitalisation funds required of individual banks. While the connubial metaphors offered readers a perception of an important exercise that entails due process, cooperation, and togetherness in achieving the stipulated recapitalisation funds. Metaphors perform multifarious functions in the construction and comprehension of financial issues. They are not the consequence of genus, but the sequence of motivated cognitive devices used by Nigerian journalists in rendering contemporary Nigerian issues.

Highlights

Metaphor is pervasive in every human interaction
Since investigating metaphorical representations allows us to see underlying conceptual system, this paper examines the use of conceptual metaphors in the 2005 bank recapitalisation discourse to influence the understanding of the readers on the matter of mergers and acquisitions of banks
These were matters on how the 89 existing commercial banks as at 2005 could meet up with the 25 billion NGN capitalisation requirement either by absolute acquisition, which was available to bigger banks, merger, which was opened to all banks, and the option of doing it alone which was available to big banks

Summary

Introduction

Its rifeness invalidates the traditional view that “metaphorical meaning is created de novo, and does not reflect pre-existing aspect of how people ordinarily conceptualise ideas and events in terms of pervasive metaphorical schemes” (Gibbs 2006: 2). Metaphor has been argued since the pioneer work of Lakoff/Johnson (1980) to be fundamental in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. Lakoff/Johnson (1980) contend that human beings deploy words of concrete source domains to relate abstract target domains. They claim that metaphors are essentially a matter of cognition, that is, the production, communication, and processing of meaning depends on mappings between the source domain and the target domain.

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Conclusion