OPHRAS 2017, pages 58–67, London, UK, November 13-14, 2017. c 2017 tradulex https://doi.org/10.26615/978-2-9701095-2-5_008 conomy and Economy of Metaphors Antonio Pamies [0000-0001-8193-9359] and Ismael Ramos Ruiz [0000-0002-5661-0460] 1 University of Granada, Spain 2 Palacio de las Columnas. Calle Puentezuelas, nº 55, 18071, Granada, Spain apamies@ugr.es Abstract: The economic discourse is essentially metaphorical, as it is observed in the analysis of its terminology, where economy is generally represented in terms of other domains. The aim of this study is to establish a relation between the metaphors found in economic discourse and the systemic economy of fig- urative language. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the most frequent source domains of these constructions has been carried out. The most produc- tive type of metaphor in the discourse on economy is the socalled medical metaphor, where economy is understood as a living organism. We have ana- lyzed a corpus of economic texts from the Spanish press, in order to identify and quantify all the "diseases of the economy”, be they terminological, phraseo- logical or purely discursive. We find relevant regularities between the lexical- ized metaphors of economic terminology and the internal economy of figurative semantics. Keywords: metaphor, phraseology, Corpus linguistics. 1 Introduction The terminology of economics is basically metaphorical, and -at the same time- econ- omy serves as a model for conceptualizing other domains metaphorically, to the point that even linguistics explains the evolution of languages by means of the so-called principle of linguistic economy [17], which is a dynamic balance between the em- ployed means (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) and the obtained communicative re- sults 1 . A fundamental resource of this economy is figurative language, which, by structur- ing one reality in terms of another one, saves having to create and memorize new words, albeit in return for the effort of disambiguate very often. Such analogies are not as arbitrary or unpredictable as they seem, for recurrent associations of ideas have been observed, such as conceptual metaphors ([14]: 43); or culturemes [22], mecha- nisms considered as very productive (another economic image). This also applies for specialized terminology (cf. [37]). This systematic phenomenon explains why -in the lexicon of modern languages- there is an average of four figurative meanings for each 1 Thus, for example, a language with few phonemes compensates it with polysyllabic words, and a language with monosyllabic words compensates it with a rich inventory of phonemes. 58