From record highs to new lows: A cognitive linguistic study of the figurative language of economic indicators

This paper investigates how English uses the economic indicators inflation and price figuratively to describe broader economic phenomena, drawing on authentic data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Adopting the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the study examines how metaphor and image schemas structure our understanding of economic processes. Five morphosyntactic patterns are analysed: Inflation + Verb, Verb + Inflation, Price + Verb, Verb + Price, and the Caused Motion construction. The analysis reveals that abstract economic entities are consistently reified and metaphorically construed in terms of motion, spatial configuration, force dynamics, and agency. Image schemas such as UP/DOWN, PATH, and CONTAINMENT motivate expressions of scalar change, while conceptual metaphors (e.g., INFLATION IS A KILLER, HIGH PRICES ARE BURDENS) frame inflation and price as agentive or manipulable forces. Special attention is given to the interaction of grammatical construction and metaphorical content, particularly in the Caused Motion pattern, where non-volitional economic causes metaphorically initiate movement toward reified scalar goals. The study concludes that metaphor and grammatical structure work in tandem to conceptualise economic indicators, confirming the central claim of cognitive linguistics that metaphor is a foundational mechanism of thought.