Lexical metaphorisation of words representing the INDUSTRY and INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY conceptual domains (Based on popular-science biological English discourse)

Abstract

The article considers how the conceptual metaphor functions in biological popular science English discourse. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the correlation between the target domain represented by all branches of Biology (biological popular science discourse) and the INDUSTRY and INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY source domains by examining a plethora of metaphoric expressions constituting them. By using continuous sampling method, as well as methods of conceptual and component analysis, the author considers metaphorical expressions which constitute the source domains. This paper analyses the lexical units from English and American popular science articles on Biology in order to identify the conceptual grounds which underlie the conceptual mappings between the target and source domains. In this paper we combine the approaches of Russian and Western linguistic traditions (Chudinov, Lakoff ). The modern approach to metaphor, developed in the beginning of the 20th century and combining the embodied and communicative approaches (B. Hampe), is also examined. The works of the Russian linguists dedicated to the linguistic picture of the world (V. Maslova, N. Zanegina) are covered as well. The data (2 410 metaphorical expressions) confi rm that the majority of the secondary meanings developed by the lexemes under analysis show a sharp contrast with their primary (basic) meanings.The obtained results prove that the metaphoric expressions belonging to the INDUSTRY domain seem to be less frequent in comparison to the INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY source domain, which allows to build up a detailed thesaurus and a large number of contexts. Furthermore, the results help to discover that the most common target domains to describe this type of discourse happen to be cells, fungi, plants and some genetic material. This can be explained by the close attention to the most imperceptible processes that happen on the molecular level.

Keywords

• biological discourse
• conceptual metaphor
• industry
• information technology