Metaphor in specialised languagean English-Spanish comparative study in marine biology

Resumen

Some decades ago, metaphorical expressions (and figurative language in general) were thought to have a marginal role in science. Because of this, research on metaphor in specialised knowledge domains only began in the last two decades (1990s and 2000s). Now there is a general consensus of opinion that the study of terminological metaphor contributes to more effective communication between the groups of people with different knowledge levels. In short, terminological metaphor (TM) is pivotal in the treatment and diffusion of specialised information. This research study provides a contrastive analysis of TM in English and Spanish to show how metaphor is instrumental in conceptualisations in marine biology. Our results highlight the ways in which metaphor varies across languages. This study adopts a cognitive-oriented perspective, and is based on theoretical premises from Terminology and Cognitive Linguistics. Therefore, our work is within the field of cognitive-oriented Terminology. Regarding Terminology, we explore different theoretical models to account for TM and also situate it in regards to data fields such as lexical structure and variants/synonyms. Regarding Cognitive Linguistics, we focus on Cognitive Semantics theories of metaphor proposed within this framework, and use those principles that are relevant for our study. In this respect, the cognitive theories of metaphor and the experientialist view that they advocate can be used to analyse TM. The major goals pursued and the corresponding results achieved are the following: 1. To enrich the study of terminological metaphor by providing corpus-based analysis and concordance-derived data (Deignan 2005; Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006). This was attained by relying on a productive, time-efficient annotation system that ensured the retrieval of metaphorical terms in English and Spanish from a vast repository of marine biology academic journal articles. The strategies applied provided rich qualitative and quantitative information about marine biology metaphorical expressions. 2. To formulate a typology of conceptual metaphors applicable to terminological metaphor. An introspective, psycholinguistic analysis of marine biology metaphors led us to provide ground-breaking refinements to the traditional distinction between structural-conceptual metaphors and resemblance metaphors, as well as give an innovative insight into the nature of resemblance metaphors. 3. To shed light on comparative aspects of terminological metaphor and formulate principles for conceptual metaphor description. This is necessary because cross-linguistic variation of metaphor is one of the areas in which knowledge is currently tentative or lacking, together with diachronic change (Stefanowitsch 2006: 9). It was found that (i) most interlinguistic pair terms extracted from the corpus share the same conceptual metaphor in English and Spanish; some of them share the same conceptual metaphor, but focus on a more or less specific/generic aspect of the source domain; (iii) a good deal of the pair terms are grounded in different metaphors; (iv) some pairs include a term that is metaphorical, whereas its interlinguistic equivalent is literal. 4. To demonstrate the existence of interlinguistic differences in terminological metaphorisation resulting from cognitive and cultural factors, which give rise to interlinguistic differences in the domain of marine biology. Quite a few of the marine biology metaphorical terms were shown to have a sociocultural grounding in English (e.g. cookie-cutter shark) and Spanish (e.g. ochavo).