Situated metaphor in scientific discourse

Abstract

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.