'Corporate marriages', 'hostile takeovers' and 'the race for market domination' - this book looks at the metaphors used in business magazines and discusses their impact on readers' cognition and business as a social practice. Koller gives particular attention to the gendered nature of such metaphors and what they could ultimately mean for women in business. In doing so, the book uses a corpus of authentic data. Quantitative analysis of a large collection of articles and qualitative investigations into a number of sample texts present the reader with the cognitive and discursive underpinnings of business magazine texts.

Koller's theoretical approach reconciles cognitive linguistics with critical approaches to language and discourse, and thus combines two important and much debated areas into an integrated research agenda. Of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of media discourse.

'...a fine study which does not only provide interesting empirical results but may also be taken as a methodological and theoretical model for further work in the analysis of metaphor in discourse.' - Gerard Steen, Cognitive Linguistics

List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Masculinized Metaphors
Theory: A Critical Cognitive Framework for Metaphor Research
Method: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses of Metaphor
Business Media on Marketing: Metaphors of War, Sports and Games
Business Media on Mergers and Acquisitions: Metaphors of Evolutionary Struggle
Conclusion: Gender-neutral Metaphors
Appendix: Corpus Data
Notes
Bibliography
Index

VERONIKA KOLLER is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Business Communication at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in Austria. Her research focuses on cognitive semantics and Critical Discourse Analysis, especially corporate and media discourse. Her current work addresses the cognitive structure of corporate identity and its multi-modal communication in discourse.