Chiavetta, E. Sciarrino, S., Willimas, C. (eds), Popularisation and the Media, Edipuglia: Bari ISBN 978-88-7228-748-4

Abstract Metaphors provide valuable insights into the contextualized transmission of specialized knowledge in the form of popularised constructs. This paper explores metaphorical expressions and patterns in the popularisation of economic discourse. The study focuses on the linguistic choices made by the British press to represent the development of the euro between 1999 and 2012, respectively indicating its introduction as the single currency adopted by the European Union on 1 January 1999, and the nadir of the currency’s decline. Metaphors used for discussing the rise and fall of the euro are identified and investigated in a corpus of 67 articles from The Economist.. Recurrent semantic tags underlying metaphorical source domains in the corpus are compared with the BNC sampler reference corpus using Wmatrix Web-­‐based software, and metaphoric patterns are identified. The pivotal aim is to prove the high frequency of metaphorical constructs use by the press as a popularised form of specialized discourse which structures and explains complex economic concepts. Discourse is thus organized as a narrative which enables the reader to better understand the issues under discussion.