Kollaps, Schock und Virus. Zur Krankheitsmetaphorik in der Presseberichterstattung der griechischen Wirtschaftskrise 2015. Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich

Title: Collapse, Shock, and Virus. On the Metaphors of Disease in the Press Coverage of the Greek Economic Crisis 2015. A Comparison of the German and Italian Press.

In the current study I analyze the media coverage of the Greek financial crisis during the summer of 2015, comparing German and Italian press reports. The study is based on two manually annotated corpora from the online-versions of the broadsheet newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung and La Repubblica covering the periods from 1.6.2015 to 15.7.2015, during which the failure of political negotiations exacerbated the crisis and the Grexit seemed unavoidable. The analysis focuses on metaphors in which DISEASE is a source domain and is preceded by a brief outline of the discourse-historical background of the disease metaphor in the economic sphere. Based on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Metaphor Analysis, this study aims to compare the different views of the Greek crisis that were established by the use of the disease metaphor in the German and the Italian corpus. The persuasive and ideological potential of recurrent disease metaphors will be explored in order to provide an interpretation of the positions of Germany and Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy in European media discourse.