Metaphor and Metonymy in the Economic Media Language Variety: A Corpus-based Approach

News texts, and specially news headlines, must be interesting and persuasive so that they can draw the addressee's attention and encourage him/her to study and follow the news. One way to achieve this goal is to use metaphor and metonymy in the language of media. Metaphor and metonymy, as two cognitive conceptual processes, have their root in thinking and conceptualization processes and are the integral parts of the human cognitive system. The present research explores the function and importance of metaphor and metonymy in Persian economic media discourse and tries to identify and explain the fundamental metaphors and metonymys in this field. Besides, possible hierarchical relations between them will be taken into consideration. The data include 700 headlines taken from: economic news headlines of “Donya-ye Eghtesad” newspaper in all its issue numbers in Azar 1394 A.P., economic news headlines of “Young Journalists Club” news agency and “Emruz Online” news portal in Azar 1394 A.P. The results indicate that the main conceptual metaphors in the economic discourse include: “Economy is a living being”, “Economy is human”, “Economy is a route”, “Economy is a space/container”, “Economy is a natural phenomenon”, “Economy is a car”, and “Economy is substance/thing”. Moreover, some of the directional metaphors are significantly present in the language of economy.