War Metaphors in Business: A Metaphostructional Analysis

This paper adopts the notion of metaphostruction (Wiliński 2015), the conceptual theory of metaphor (Kӧvecses 2002) and the corpus-based method geared specifi cally for investigating the interaction between target domains and the source domain lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as metaphostructional analysis (Wiliński 2015), is used to determine the degree of association between the target domain of business and the source domain lexemes derived from military terminology. The results of the metaphostructional analysis reveal that there are indeed war terms that demonstrate strong or loose associations with the target domain of business, and that these instantiate different metaphorical mappings.