Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes

This work is a cognitive-linguistic investigation of metaphor in languages for special purposes (LSP). Metaphorization is (re-)defined as a transfer of mental schemata which are mapped from a familiar source domain to analogically structure a hard-to-grasp target domain. Metaphors are empirically evaluated in an investigation of academic writing as well as of popular-scientific texts in the domains of economics, medicine and computing. The empirical analysis provides evidence that even scientific reasoning recurs to metaphorical thinking as an information-processing strategy. Since metaphors appear to define the scientific paradigms which determine (but also constrain) the scope of scientific reasoning, the findings give rise to a discussion about the objectivity of science.

Contents : Theories of Metaphor - Metaphors and Models - Metaphors and Knowledge Representations - Languages for Special Purposes (LSP) - Expert Model versus Commonsense Model - Method of Investigating Metaphor in LSP - Metaphors in LSP.