Um estudo de metáforas terminológicas presentes em gêneros acadêmicos da economia: aspectos linguísticos, comunicativos e cognitivos

Abstract

The present work, within the context of Terminology, aims to analyze metaphorical concepts used in Economics, the object-field of our research. Such investigation is justified due to the fact that the scientific language of this field is a prolific resource in the conceptualizations and denominations of this area of knowledge, since the metaphors of economics make it possible to grasp a knowledge "complex" along with analogies that refer to something already known in our daily lives. For the accomplishment of this research, we constituted a corpus composed by academic genres which circulate among specialists and in formation courses in the economics area, such as: scientific articles, masters dissertations and doctoral theses available in electronic format through the USP and Unicamp websites. We observe that the degree of specialization of the studied texts determined the nature and function of the terminological metaphors of this field of study: to expose information in order to transmit and construct knowledge, collaborating in the process of conceptualizing a referent-due to relations of similarities established between the specialized concept and a familiar concept. The terms prospected and analyzed under the bias of Cognitive Linguistics reveal that the concepts presented by this type of language are projected by the source domains of other domains of knowledge such as physics, biology; besides relying on everyday domains, which founds the structure of scientific thought. Finally, we also consider that the metaphors of economics from the point of view of their communicative, semantic and cognitive aspects have a pedagogical and highly heuristic function, since the mapping of their sets of conceptual correspondences between the elements of a source domain for the target domain reveals the understanding of concepts that didacticize their knowledge in a process of interlocution of teaching and learning at the specialization level.