Medical Metaphor as an Instrument of Increasing Performance of International Students from the Preparatory Department

Kashkan, Galina V.; Provalova, Nadezhda V.; Sukhalentceva, Natalia A.; Bayarjargal, Enhbold

doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.574

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…It has been recognised in many specialist areas such as biology. Kashkan et al (2015) discuss the usefulness of metaphors in teaching biology and medicine in pre-university programs for international students. Kanthan and Mills (online) investigate the importance of metaphors, analogies, and similes in teaching pathology.…”

Section: Metaphor In Specialist Discourse and Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Didactic potential of metaphors used in medical discourse

Karska

Prażmo

2017

LingBaW

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Specialist languages should be straightforward and unambiguous. In areas such as law, business or medicine precision and to-the-point wording is required. However, in order to facilitate the description of complicated matters, and especially in expert to non-expert communication, unexpected strategies, e.g. metaphorisation, are used. Conceptual metaphor theory, as initially introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) states that human beings tend to think in metaphors, i.e. we are engaged in constant search of similarities between concepts. This drive for pattern recognition helps us understand the unknown in terms of the familiar, the abstract in terms of the concrete. Most conceptual metaphors are grounded in our physical experience of the world, which means that we draw from this familiar experience while creating metaphorical mappings to the complex, abstract concepts. Controversial as it may seem, the same process applies to understanding professional terms and scientific notions, and as a result the language of law, business, medicine, etc. is heavily metaphorical in nature. In our presentation we focus on medicine alone and analyse a corpus of medical text in search of conceptual metaphors. We claim, that rather than obscuring the message, metaphors actually make it clearer and more precise. They enrich conceptualisation, structure the semantics of the message and serve a number of pragmatic functions, esp. in doctor to patient communication. By choosing a certain metaphor, the message may e.g. be softened in order to lessen the impact it has on the recipient. Moreover, it may be more easily understood if it is built on an adequate conceptual metaphor. Many metaphors used in the medical discourse are based on multimodal representations e.g. descriptions of diseases often invoke the imagery of food including its shape, colour, texture, and smell. Such multimodality of representation (cf. Forceville, 2009 and online) engages a number of cognitive faculties for the construction of a complex conceptualisation and in this way helps us gain better understanding of the concepts described. We claim that conceptual metaphor and esp. pictorial metaphor is a very effective tool used in didactics and its use is perfectly justified in scientific discourses, including the medical discourse. Therefore, in our presentation we analyse pictorial metaphors found in medical discourse and in the field of radiology in particular.

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Section: Metaphor In Specialist Discourse and Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Didactic potential of metaphors used in medical discourse

Karska

Prażmo

2017

LingBaW

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“…This present discussion about the 'in' metaphorical preposition is motivated by Lakoff andJohnson's seminal work published in 1980/2003 as well as by the many publications written by other scholars who are also inspired by it. Investigations on metaphors have been conducted in many different fields of research, such as in behavioral science (Pendrous et al, 2020), artificial intelligence (Carbonell, Sánchez-Esguevillas, & Carro, 2016), general science (Beger, 2016;Roberts et al, 2019;Roldán-Riejos & Cuadrado, 2015), psychotherapy (Killick, Curry, & Myles, 2016), psychology (Bultmann et al, 2019;Raja, 2019), biology (Castellane & Paternotte, 2018;Kashkan et al, 2015), news discourse (Mujagić, 2018), politics (Alousque, 2015;Chan & Yap, 2015;Filipczuk-Rosińska, 2016;Yi, Koenig, & Roland, 2019), demographics (Catalano & Musolff, 2019), translation studies (Egan, 2015), comics (Domínguez, 2015;Forceville & Paling, 2018;Szawerna, 2018;Tasić & Stamenković, 2015), television series (Izgarjan & Djurić, 2016;Terry, 2019), computer programming (Pérez-Marín et al, 2020), and music (Mishankina & Zheleznyakova, 2015;Pannese, Rappaz, & Grandjean, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

I am falling in love, Ouch!: Ontological metaphors at work

Roselani

2020

Lingua Cultura

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The research aimed to track the distribution of in metaphors and explore their ontological function in the abstracts of English research articles in the sub-disciplines of theoretical linguistics and pragmatics. The lack of empirical evidence on the subject had become the inspiration to base the research on a corpus. The corpus consisted of 40 research article abstracts; 20 from Journal of Linguistics and another 20 from Journal of Pragmatics. By using a quantitative method, the results show that theoretical linguistics abstracts are more densely populated with ‘in’ metaphors. However, in terms of in-preposition phrase topic complement variations, they are less varied. Qualitatively, the results confirm a notion proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) that ‘in’ metaphors function cognitively by providing ontological status to abstract objects. Their existence proves to play an important role in academic texts.

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Medical Metaphor as an Instrument of Increasing Performance of International Students from the Preparatory Department

Cited by 2 publications

References 1 publication

Didactic potential of metaphors used in medical discourse

Didactic potential of metaphors used in medical discourse

I am falling in love, Ouch!: Ontological metaphors at work

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