Grammatical Metaphor Through the Lens of Software? Examining 'Crisis' in a Corpus of Articles from The Financial Times

The chapter reports on research into the metaphorical framing of the most recent financial/economic crisis as it emerges from a purpose-built corpus of articles from The Financial Times 2008, focusing on interpersonal and ideational grammatical metaphor within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The aim of the chapter is two-fold: on the one hand, select results are discussed with a view to highlighting patterns of use and effects of GM in news discourse; on the other, ‘pros and cons’ of corpus-assisted research on metaphor are taken into account. The introductory section is dedicated to an overview of the notion of grammatical metaphor, also in relation to lexical metaphor; the subsequent sections proceed to describing the methodology and discussing select results.