Metaphor In And On Science

Abstract

Research into the use of conceptual metaphors in the language of science has had a long tradition since new concepts in science are born almost on a daily basis and there is a need to associate them with a linguistic sign that will introduce this concept into language use both inside and outside of the scientific community (Gentner and Jeziorski, 1993, Mičunović , 2012). The results of the research show that students successfully recognized conventionalized metaphorical expressions in the field of science, while tasks with visual input and extracting concepts in the original and target domains had slightly poorer results. The assumption is that those metaphorical expressions that have become part of the broader vocabulary of English are easier to identify precisely because of the ubiquitous scientific discourse that crosses the boundaries of a strictly academic community and mostly through various publicistic scientific and journalistic papers enters the general public discourse.

Keywords

• conceptual metaphor
• science discourse
• mapping
• public discourse