"In the depths of the world's credit crisis": Compelling Synergies between Conceptual and Grammatical Metaphor in a Corpus-assisted Study of the British and Italian Financial Press

One of the central tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that metaphor is pervasive in both language and thought. While lexical metaphors (non-standard uses of lexical units) have been widely studied as surface realisations of conceptual metaphors, less attention has been paid to the Systemic Functional theory of grammatical metaphor, which posits that metaphorical variation also involves grammatical structures. With the focus placed on nominalisations as grammatical metaphors in two ad hoc corpora of articles from The Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, I show that: a. linguistic (lexical) realisations of conceptual metaphors and nominalisations tend to co-occur, and b. they tend to work in a cohesive fashion. I identify and discuss three main patterns of synergy on the basis of qualitative analysis through select examples.