Cleaning up after the Tiger. Mediating the Crisis in Ireland

This collection of articles brings together contributions from a range of disciplines such as Sociology, Political Science, Linguistics and Literay Studies, and focuses on the unexpected economic and social crisis which has severely hit Ireland since 2007/2008. My paper, "Metaphors and Crisis in the Irish Newspaper Discourse: A Call for Disaffection?" deals with the journalistic discourse reporting on the crisis and focuses on the use of metaphors meant to represent the economic situation for a popular audience of non-experts. As regards the notion of metaphor, the study relies on the theoretical framework pointed out in Group Mu's General Rhetoric complemented by the ideas of systematicity and mapping of domains articulated by Lakoff and Johnson's in their Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The linguistic analysis is carried out by means of the tools developed by Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The corpus under scrutiny consists of 80 articles (91,647 words) taken from The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, and published between 2008 and 2009. The results show how several semes being employed to speak the economic domain in terms of another are eventually meant to naturalize economic processes, presenting them as violent and ineludible as forces of nature, that is as something which is just taken for granted, cannot be avoided, nor questioned.