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The Financial Lexicon
The Financial Lexicon
ABSTRACT. This paper explores the ethnographic dimension of lexical items and phrases charecteristic
of the financial milieu. In order to ascertain the wide-ranging nature of such expressions, I have looked
into the corpus of papers currently issued. The existence of the fossilized items double-digit profit,
portfolio; acronyms of various kinds (FTSE, SIB, COD, etc.); nominalized phrasal verbs (writedown,
outflow, etc.) and a handful of widely-used stock market lexicon (bond, securities and equities) are
indicative of a cultural stratum that transgresses the microlinguistic scope of such specialized language.
Hence it will be worth considering that colour yellow (Financial Times, COMPANIES & MARKETS,
"Workers accuse BP of taking safety risks", Monday August 26 2002) is a productive linguistic device as
in yellow journalism, the phrase being the outcome of the popular Yellow Kid cartoon strip published in
the New York World in 1895, where yellow ink was used to attract a larger readership. In the field of
finance other yellow compounds will arouse our interest: yellow-tagged or yellow-dog contracts. In
relation to Spanish business papers, I will discuss some cross-cultural dissonances.