This article analyses the nature of mental imagery in metaphoric thought as envisaged by the contemporary theory of metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (Lako¤ 1993). Our study of metaphor in the field of marine biology draws on two crucial aspects of mental imagery, namely dynamicity and pervasiveness. Image metaphors and behaviour-based metaphors have generally been regarded as two di¤erent types of resemblance metaphor. In our view, the dynamicity of certain mental images highlights inherent similarities between these two types of metaphor, and makes the di¤erences between them more apparent than real. For this reason, we propose a more refined description of resemblance metaphors in terms of the static or dynamic nature of the mental images underlying them. Our study also underlines the fact that mental images permeate all classes of metaphor, and that the pervasiveness and dynamicity of mental images a¤ords insights into both resemblance metaphors and non-resemblance metaphors.
Cognitive linguists have finally agreed that metaphorical thought is the result of neither nature nor nurture, but a combination of both. Despite the acknowledgment of this dual grounding (Sinha, 1999), cross-linguistic studies addressing the significance of cultural factors to form specialised concepts through metaphor are still rare. Research is even scarcer when it comes to terminological resemblance metaphor. To fill this gap, this paper examines a set of resemblance metaphor term pairs in English and Spanish, which had been retrieved from a corpus of marine biology texts extracted from academic journals. Based on the analysis of these terms, we propose a typology of metaphors which classifies them according to their level of socio-cognitive situatedness. This typology shows that: (i) sensorimotor perception and sociocultural factors merge into a physical-social experience that shapes scientific knowledge through metaphor, and (ii) sociocognitive patterns involved in terminological metaphor formation give rise to inter-linguistic variation and commonalities.
Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 359-374
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