The economic discourse is essentially metaphorical, as it is observed in the analysis of its terminology, where economy is generally represented in terms of other domains. The aim of this study is to establish a relation between the metaphors found in economic discourse and the systemic economy of figurative language. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the most frequent source domains of these constructions has been carried out. The most productive type of metaphor in the discourse on

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... onomy is the so-called medical metaphor, where economy is understood as a living organism. We have analyzed a corpus of economic texts from the Spanish press, in order to identify and quantify all the "diseases of the economy", be they terminological, phraseological or purely discursive. We find relevant regularities between the lexicalized metaphors of economic terminology and the internal economy of figurative semantics.