The project "Universals and Variants of English and Romanian Business Metaphors. A Corpus-Based Conceptual Mapping of Contemporary Journalese" is based on the hypothesis that cognitive metaphors are instantiations of cultural categories manifested in the language spoken by the community that shares a common set of characteristics within a given cultural matrix, and that metaphors clustered in cognitive categories account for cultural categories, both in terms of conceptual universals and variants, resulting in a complex mapping of interrelated cross-connections.

Being an interdisciplinary research, it entails close cooperation between experts in linguistics, computational linguistics and educational sciences.

Specific research aims are: creating two corpora (British English and Romanian), realising a conceptual mapping of business metaphors, identifying universals and variants of Romanian and English contemporary business metaphors through contrastive quantitative and qualitative analysis, creating an ontology-based classification of business metaphors and exploiting the pedagogical values of the research results.

The concrete project outcomes are setting up a computational linguistics laboratory and a web portal at the host university to ensure further exploitation of project results, and creating pedagogical instruments for teaching intercultural business communication and Business English.

Dissemination of results is ensured throughout the duration of the project and after its life.