THE LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF ECONOMICAL BREAKDOWNS IN THE MASS MEDIA LANGUAGE AS INVERTED RHETORIC OF VIVITY. ON CRISIS IN NEWS AND EDITORIAL WRITINGS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE 2008-2009

Résumé

This article examines the description of economic crisis in The New Yort Times with examples of articles that appeared in the years 2008 and 2009. There are three dimensions the crisis as an event is described; one of them is the description of crisis as a movement or a development of international and global extension (spacial dimension). The second is the metaphorical one actually describing the crisis as a natural force. The third one is the description of the crisis as a more or less 'global crisis'. Our question is "How is the crisis as medial event described, if there is no concrete reference object to refer to, but just a, semantically expressed, concept denoting a non-material and non-perceptible entity described as crises?" Taking the examples from The New York Times we will demonstrate that such a lack of a concrete object does not alter the language of journalism, except that a (for the news language uncommon) metaphoric production takes part. The activity of the object represented by the noun is the agent of activities, even though the processes are highly abstract. On a meta-level, the language in the news becomes an allegorical network with the metaphorized object crisis as the agent of movement in an intertextual setting of texts using the expression.