Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

[Uroshnor]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

thx fred for deleting my msg posted last night.

uroshnor... i apologize for my comment. it was uncalled for... had a bawwww day.

Metalman, I saw your comment. Perhaps you were expecting something else? Have you read many MA theses in the field of Linguistics? I'd say mine is pretty standard in terms of layout and content.

As I note in my paper, metaphors occur when two separate conceptual domains overlap partially. These separate domains are called the Target Domain and the Source Domain, and metaphors are evaluative to the extent that the Source Domains have positive or negative connotations.

For gold, the main Source Domains--with both positive or negative connotations--I found were:

Negative:

1) diseases
2) cults
3) binding chains
4) gambling
5) asset bubbles

Positive:

1) insurance
2) a safe location

And of course, I provide a breakdown of the relative frequencies for these conceptual metaphors based upon how many times their linguistic realizations were found in the two subcorpora.

If that's not your cup of tea, I see what you mean, but basically overall, it could be of value to note that this type of metaphorical evaluation is going on when newspaper authors are reporting on gold's rise and fall, if you wanted to be a critically aware reader.

For many of us on this site, we could be aware that this is going on implicitly, but my dissertation makes all this explicit for analysis. I also cite other authors in my dissertation regarding the fact that business people in general are not very aware of the language they use or the extent to which the language they use is infused with values.

[metalman]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

By the way, for those of you who will not end up reading the dissertation, but would still like just a bite-size summary of the main thrust, I'll post here my favorite quote about metaphors (and one that is in the paper):

"Not only does metaphor shield a proposition from direct discourse, as nothing literal has been said, but it has the inestimable advantage of combining the fact that the speaker cannot be held responsible for the message with the flagging of the fact that there is a message being conveyed which cannot be discussed openly" (Cameron & Low, 1999: 86).

Everyone can see that this applies not only to all politicians every time they open their mouths, but also to finance reporting, since the headlines and the articles are so metaphor-laden.

thx fred for deleting my msg posted last night.

uroshnor... i apologize for my comment. it was uncalled for... had a bawwww day.

[Uroshnor]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

By the way, for those of you who will not end up reading the dissertation, but would still like just a bite-size summary of the main thrust, I'll post here my favorite quote about metaphors (and one that is in the paper):

"Not only does metaphor shield a proposition from direct discourse, as nothing literal has been said, but it has the inestimable advantage of combining the fact that the speaker cannot be held responsible for the message with the flagging of the fact that there is a message being conveyed which cannot be discussed openly" (Cameron & Low, 1999: 86).

Everyone can see that this applies not only to all politicians every time they open their mouths, but also to finance reporting, since the headlines and the articles are so metaphor-laden.

[Uroshnor]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

Thanks, Fred!

FYI, in the feedback provided to me by my adviser, he called my Literature Review "overwrought", but this may be a benefit for those of you unfamiliar with how extended the field of metaphor research is. There has been a thriving, flourishing community of researchers and linguists publishing all manner of metaphor studies for the last several decades, and my dissertation provides a nice introduction for those of you unfamiliar with the specifics. If you are primarily only interested in gold, however, I recommend you go straight to the Results and Discussion sections.

Gold and Evaluative Metaphors.docx

[FRED]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

Upped the docx limit to 2MB for you. Please post your document in this thread. Thanks!

[Uroshnor]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

In accordance with a request from E.J., I am making my dissertation available for the benefit of the members of this site. To be specific, this dissertation was written in fulfillment of a requirement for an Applied Linguistics MA I recently completed at the University of Nottingham.

I submitted it in early September, and now that it has been marked, I'm ready to share it. British universities award marks along the following scale: fail, pass, merit, distinction. I got a distinction.

In general, this dissertation will be of value to those who are interested in gold and the way it is represented in the mainstream media. I hope that reading it will improve what the famous linguist and Critical Discourse Analyst Norman Fairclough calls "critical media literacy"--or one's ability to critically evaluate the types of discourses produced by media companies, which are largely for the benefit of those in positions of power rather than a strictly objective reporting of the news. The alternative--all too common--is to simply be a passive recipient of the values impressed upon us day after day, and uncritically incorporate them into our own outlooks through choices in language and ways of thinking. I believe such a critical media literacy is especially important in relation to gold, and I have no doubt that members of this site will agree.

This can be illustrated by an excerpt from Appendix 1 of my dissertation:

A critique of the terms used by metaphor researchers is supplementary to the main purpose of this paper, and so this proposal for a change in terminology has been relegated to an appendix. Goatly (2007) speaks of washing the mind of the value judgments and ideology that are latent in metaphors. However, does one repeatedly wash one’s mind every time one hears or reads a metaphor? It doesn’t quite capture the full process appropriately, and hence this washing metaphor is not apt. Furthermore, there could be many times when one agrees with the value judgments that metaphors entail and so researchers should adopt a term that acknowledges this bifurcation: those values one agrees with and those one does not.

An improvement is the conceptual metaphor of the ideological immune system of Snelson (1993), though Snelson originally framed it in a context related to skepticism and critical thinking. This metaphor better underscores the fact that we should be ever vigilant in detecting and analyzing the latent values and ideology in metaphors—just as properly functioning antibodies of an immune system detect and neutralize invading viruses or bacterial infections that are harmful, not beneficial. Thus, for business media discourse, our ideological antibodies should detect any negative conceptual metaphors that could function to manipulate us into liking or disliking asset classes that may operate on a subliminal level. An attempt at an ideological immunization would be linguistic studies such as this one. One prime virtue of this metaphor is that linguists already speak as though this were the dominant conceptual metaphor. Baker states:
By becoming more aware of how language is drawn on to construct discourses or various ways of looking at the world, we should be more resistant to attempts by writers of texts to manipulate us by suggesting to us what is ‘common-sense’ or ‘accepted-wisdom’ (2006: 13; emphasis added).
Thus, just as we become resistant to infections by having our immune system detect foreign intruders, we may become resistant to the type of manipulations mentioned by Baker. Metaphorically, any formerly latent, now explicit ideology would be any infections one were formerly susceptible to, but now are able to fight off due to activated ideological antibodies.

I'd like to conclude by stressing the empirical value of corpus linguistic studies. We all know that gold investors are stigmatized with the label "gold bugs", and we may be able to cite several other negatively evaluative metaphors in relation to gold investors that newspaper authors regularly employ. However, no mere human mind can come to terms with the frequencies of all the various metaphors. Only a computer can do this. Hence, even if someone were to be familiar with several of these metaphors in my dissertation, it is still of value to see the comparative breakdown of their frequencies.

The Discussion section deals with what linguists call "Pragmatics", or the way in which these texts, and the metaphorical elements they contain, may function to pragmatically affect any readers.

FYI, the file is in format docx and has a file size of 1.2 MB, which exceeds this site's limit by 200 kb or so. Hence, if you would like the dissertation, please send a request to Uroshnor@hotmail.com, or I'm open to suggestions on how to share it with Itulip.com members.

Is there another forum which has a larger file size limit suitable for sharing it?

[don]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

I thought your rabbit-quick EJ links were all in your head.

(I'm writing this from recovery . . . .)

[metalman]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

My Age of 'Tulip Heroes has dimmed, just a bit . . . .

yowch! mr don! mercy!

ok, ok. i take it back.

tried a keyword search vs the whole sentence advanced search...

Search Types: Posts

Keywords: high gold price embarrassment central bankers

User Name: EJ

1st item returned is correct.

Search:

Search took 0.08 seconds.

• On Track for a Bond Market Crash - Part II: What will collapse the U.S. Treasury Bond market? - Eric Janszen
  
  Started by EJ, 09-24-12 06:30 PM
  
  
  
  
  
  • Replies: 215
  • Views: 15,063
  
  

  Last Post: 03-06-14 01:37 PM

  by soliver

  
  

[don]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

trick with the itulip advanced seach thing is to throw total sentences at it... not keywords ala google. Uroshnor had that... made it easy. if you look based on 3 - 5 words from memory... fuggedaboudit.

My Age of 'Tulip Heroes has dimmed, just a bit . . . .

[shiny!]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

trick with the itulip advanced seach thing is to throw total sentences at it... not keywords ala google. Uroshnor had that... made it easy. if you look based on 3 - 5 words from memory... fuggedaboudit.

That's cool. Didn't know Search could take full sentences. Thanks bunches!

Sometimes Search leads to a lonnnnnng page that contains the result but it's hard to find. When that happens I do "Ctrl" + "f" to find it. In the little "Find" box I'll enter a word from my query in order to highlight it. In this case I entered the word "astute" and it took me right to the quote.

[metalman]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

HOW did you do that??? I've tried many times to use the search tool here and find it next to useless.

trick with the itulip advanced seach thing is to throw total sentences at it... not keywords ala google. Uroshnor had that... made it easy. if you look based on 3 - 5 words from memory... fuggedaboudit.

[lektrode]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

thx, chuck. ej advised us to kick back & enjoy the show.. been doin' that......
i stop in occasionally to see if i oughta sit up & pucker up again ala mar 2000 & dec 2007 when ej's radar saw the last ones a'coming.

+1
atta boy!
altho eye have noted that you also seem to pop in whenever the metal markets start to get... uhhh... interesting?

but better be paying attention to this radar the next couple, as they saying Arthur is gonna rain on the parades - altho it looks like just a typical boomer'cast for up north, eh MM?

[metalman]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

by the way metal, good to see you around still. You have been quiet.

thx, chuck. ej advised us to kick back & enjoy the show.. been doin' that...



i stop in occasionally to see if i oughta sit up & pucker up again ala mar 2000 & dec 2007 when ej's radar saw the last ones a'coming.

ps... not like mega... pining for the next crisis.

[charliebrown]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

by the way metal, good to see you around still. You have been quiet.

[metalman]

Re: Question about the origin of a specific E.J. quote

Yes, I can certainly share it once it is written. I am in the act of researching for it and composing it as I go. It is due in early September. I've built a specialized corpus of representative newspaper articles, although I'm limiting myself to only this recent gold bull market--this is not a diachronic study. The articles are either reporting on the gold price movement or op-ed commentaries, from 2001 to 2014 from the New York Times, Business Weekly, MarketWatch, and the Wall Street Journal. It has 54,000 words in it, which is more than I need for representativeness, but I wanted enough texts in the sub-corpora as well. This is actually a cross-disciplinary methodology, since it incorporates two separate fields--Corpus Linguistics, which analyzes texts via computers, and Critical Discourse Analysis, which focuses on the features of texts to reveal hidden ideologies and bias. But as I said, I'm focusing on metaphors, and in this regard the cross-fertilization of CDA and Corpus Linguistics has come to be known as Critical Metaphor Analysis from Charteris-Black (2004). There are already some interesting findings. In English, the system of Appraisal or Evaluation entail comparisons--this goes back to the sociolinguistic studies of Labov (1972) where certain varieties of English are favored over others.

Applied specifically to gold, the types of metaphors used in the articles appear to instantiate a very negative ideological stance, even when just ostensibly reporting the news. Thus, the authors are revealing their subjective bias even in supposedly giving objective facts. As I said, this is on a comparative basis, so when the dollar is said to fall, or oil, or other metals, they "fell", but when gold falls, it is "crashing", "plunging", "undergoing a brutal decline", or "gold falls of a cliff". It is as though the authors are attempting to make the readers feel that there is something extremely negative about a small gold decline, whereas--at least in this corpus of texts--they do not use the same metaphors for other asset classes. Another one that I've focused on is GOLD INVESTMENT IS GAMBLING (it's the convention to put the Conceptual Metaphors in capitals). So authors say things like, "gold bugs are scrambling to reverse their bets," or "speculators are placing bets on lower gold prices", which makes gold investors appear like idiots who are only gamblers, and not using their intelligence to invest in gold. Again, these types of metaphors are not present to any significant degree in relation to other asset classes, so the bias is demonstrated from the comparative nature of the study. And of course, calling someone a "gold bug" is evaluative to a significant degree. Business discourse in general uses a lot of animal metaphors, such as bulls and bears, to represent different market actions, but it appears that gold investors are considered such a fringe that it necessitated naming them their own animal species in metaphorical terms in business discourse.

Anyway, I wasn't able to use the search function. Could someone post the link to the webpage where that quote is located? I would really appreciate it. I will let you know more about my dissertation once I make more progress on it. There are certainly pedagogical implications. Even native speakers tend to be unaware of the types of values--and what are termed latent ideologically-loaded metaphors--that are contained in the business texts they get their news from.

the link to the post is above...

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...558#post239558

tis in part ii behind the paywall. if you have a quote from there you were a subscriber, non?

the entire ej post there is...

--

Thank you for the kind words.

For those who didn't see my comments on the other thread I said:

I've discovered at the various meetings I've had with Fed economists and others who attend meetings there that there is no faster way to clear the table after dessert than to bring up the topic of gold.

They really, really, really do not like to talk about gold.

But over the years some have learned that I'm not a journalist but an analyst; I'm not going to quote them on my web site to create controversy and traffic for me and headaches for them. That's not our business model. So one or two have opened up a bit.

One official gave me his personal and unofficial thoughts on what might happen in the highly, no extremely, no next to impossible event that the USD is officially associated with gold in some fashion some day off in the nearly infinite future. With all of those qualifications preceding his comment, he went on to give his opinion. It was an enlightening conversation and a window into a thought process.

It was not what I expected. Hint: No high taxation as I have been discussing here since 2001. The expectation is that a high gold tax rate will criminalize gold and create a black market, the opposite of what they want. They want an optimal tax rate on gold that generates the highest tax receipts for the IRS but without creating a black market. He pointed me to this paper. In fact there is concern, he said, that the existing classification of gold as a collectible may cause the tax rate to be too high if the gold price keeps rising; as the gold price rises, so does the incentive for gold holders and dealers to conspire to evade taxes.

The academic paper uses forumulas and several thousand words to explain the obvious: A rational tax authority seeks to tax at the maximum level that does not create a black market in the item taxed, because once a black market is created it tends to take on a life of its own, will consume major resources to erradicate, and calls the entire tax regime into question.

That said, the gold market is small, gold is anathema to the central banking community that in any case works primarily in the interests of the finance industry and gold isn't ever going to make investment bankers any money so I doubt we'll see the kind of bubble-friendly capital gains tax policy during the gold price run-up that we got under Clinton to goose the tech bubble to its Q1 2000 crescendo to push the budget into surplus with windfall capital gains tax receipts. Not unless there were 1000s of gold miners that Wall Street could bank.

A high gold price is a major embarrassment to central bankers. When I got in the gold price was still giving central bankers an A for the fine job they did running a 30-year credit bubble and making everyone rich. At $1750 the gold market is giving central bankers a C. At $2500 they will be giving the central banks a D and at $5000 plus an F, at which point a clear Plan B will already be underway and visible to the connected and/or astute.