The life of the green shoots metaphor in the Spanish media

Abstract

The green shoots metaphor is quite recent, but not completely new in financial language. It has been used by economists for more than a decade to refer to the first signs of economic recovery after a recession and it can easily be analysed as a specification of the more general, abstract metaphors the economy is a living organism or the economy is a plant. However, in 2009 the worldwide financial crisis made this metaphor spread fast and reach non-specialist language. This has been especially noticeable in the Spanish media (mostly television and general newspapers), where the expression was extensively used during the whole year 2009 to the point that, in only six months, the metaphor underwent important semantic and pragmatic changes and became a common referential phrase outside economic discourse. Using a corpus of occurrences of the expression in the Spanish non-specialist press throughout 2009, this paper analyses the short life of the metaphor in the Spanish media during 2009, from its ‘birth’ and first occurrences, to its ‘growth’ and evolution towards less comparative, more discursive, pragmatic functions, such as those of categorizing and of summarizing other people’s discourse. Finally, the arguable ‘death’ of the metaphor is considered, as findings indicate that context plays a crucial role in the actual survival of the expression, which has undergone some significant changes in its meaning