Metaphors in times of crisis: Legitimizing austerity?

The chapter illustrates how the metaphorical framing of the global crisis in the specialised press in 2008 may have helped to construe and legitimise the narrative of austerity that predominated in the following years. Focus is on the results of research into crisis-related conceptual metaphors and grammatical metaphors (nominalisations) in two corpora of articles from British and Italian financial newspapers. Two ad hoc corpora were built for this research, collecting first page and leading articles from the 2008 issues of The Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore. Concordances for the focus word ‘crisis’ (Italian ‘crisi’) were retrieved and analysed for linguistic realisations of conceptual metaphors and nominalisations. Quantitative analysis reveals a significant presence of both metaphorical types in the environment of ‘crisis’/’crisi’ in both corpora. Qualitative analysis shows that: (1) linguistic realisations of conceptual metaphors already framed the economic situation in pessimistic terms in the corpora under scrutiny, amplifying the tangible effects, disruptive potential, and inevitability of the crisis, especially through conceptual metaphors such as THE CRISIS IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT/ DISEASE/ WAR/ NATURAL FORCE, and (2) nominalisations produced semantically dense lexico-grammatical structures hindering comprehension for uninitiated readers, but also, crucially, ‘thingifying’ the crisis and its effects. Discussion of these aspects ultimately suggests a positive answer to the question posed by the title.