How Inflation "devoured pensions" and "added fuel to the fire" in Poland’s and the USA’s Economy Between 2022 and 2024: A Contrastive Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis

The paper presents a contrastive cognitive-linguistic analysis of metaphorical portrayals of inflation in Polish and American English financial discourse (2022–2024). Integrating Talmy’s (1988) force dynamics and Kövecses’s (2020) extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, it examines corpus data from money.pl and money.com. The study traces patterns across schematic levels – from image schemas to mental spaces – highlighting how inflation is metaphorically construed. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of collocations and metaphorical expressions, the paper identifies shared and divergent cognitive models shaped by cultural context. The findings underscore how metaphor structures economic discourse and how it reflects differing national responses to inflationary pressure.