POJMOVNE METAFORE U ITALIJANSKOM I SRPSKOM JEZIKU EKONOMIJE NA PRIMERU CILJNOG DOMENA INFLACIJA

Abstract

Acknowledging the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff, Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1992) and the fact that throughout history metaphors have been omnipresent in explaining and under- standing economic concepts (Kövecses 2002, Sosnowski 2006), this paper reveals, analyses, and compares Serbian and Italian linguistic metaphors used in journalistic economic jargon for creating conceptual metaphors whose target domain is the lexeme INFLATION. The cor- pus of texts was taken from the Italian daily la Repubblica and the Serbian newspaper Politika in the period between March and June 2022. This period coincided with the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which caused the global economic crisis. In this way, we justify the choice and the supposition that the target domain lexeme will be highly frequent in texts about the economies of the two countries. The paper aims to find similarities and differences between the Italian and Serbian language metaphors, as well as to reveal similarities or differences in conceptual, collective, and empiri- cal thinking, as well as the comprehension of the inflation phenomenon by these two nations, while using the methods of qualitative and contrastive analysis. The results confirm the presence of metaphorical expressions in both languages within all conceptual metaphors emphasised by many authors in their papers to date, mainly in English, as well as a high level of coincidence in the selection of lexemes and the source domain expressions. The findings of this research lead to the conclusion that Serbian and Italian speakers share similar, or identical, empirical and con- ceptual understanding, but also the collective feeling about the concept of inflation.