Chapter Six
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independently of the framework of texts and where professional practices
as well as specialist knowledge are hard to be included in big electronic
corpora. If these corpora become adequately balanced and tailored to the
needs of a particular specialist language, which can turn out to be an
insurmountable task on its own, they again may end up being subjective
and dependent on the views or personal preferences of the researcher. We
must also remember that according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980),
language is metaphorical through and through. As a result, metaphoricity
can be also identified on the level of grammatical constructions as well as
individual words whose grammaticalization, etymology and semantic
development reveals functioning of conceptual metaphors. For the time
being, no automatic corpus analysis can be sensitive enough to extract
these multi-level metaphors and penetrate texts at various layers of
granularity.
Cienki (2008) discusses the issue of using large corpora for metaphor
research and following Mussolf (2004) and Cameron and Deignan (2003)
argues in favor of using a representative small corpus in the first stage of
the analysis and only then analyzing a larger corpus for frequency and
patterning of the occurrence of particular aspects identified in the smaller
corpus. Because of these considerations as well as our broad
understanding of specialist language outlined in the following section, the
analysis presented here will be confined to very basic metaphors shaping
the language of financial management. It will be based mainly on
instructional materials, manuals, compendia and tutorials along with
widely available Internet resources. In this way, we hope to arrive at key
metaphorical structures which might be later verified against large
language corpora.
The specialist language of financial management
The modern workforce has been increasingly specialized and traditional
divisions of jobs may not be sufficient to describe all newly emerged
professional domains marked by ‘a unique set of cognitive needs, social
conditions and relationships with society at large’ (Gunnarsson et al. 1997:
5). Financial management can definitely be regarded as one of those
highly specialized and at the same time multi-disciplinary domains. Within
the contours of these professional areas, new languages are being
developed which very often interact and overlap with other more general
specialist languages as well as non-professional varieties of common
speech. Thus, the specialist language of financial management, associated
with a very specific professional activity, combines elements typical of