Using money metaphors in banking discourse: Three possible scenarios

Drawing on the theory of conceptual metaphors and on its socially and discursively oriented developments, this paper investigates the conceptualisation of money (and related notions like income, repayments, fees, interest rates or profit) in Romanian banking discourse. By analysing corpora composed of 74 documents issued by the National Bank of Romania (BNR) and by three other commercial banks, before and during the recent financial crisis, it aims to show how apparently unrelated metaphoric expressions (with source domains such as medicine, army or water) are in fact connected, giving rise to three coherent scenarios: a caring scenario, a physical force scenario and a river scenario. The article also highlights the role of (money) metaphor in persuading customers, creating identities and transferring ideologies.