Keep Your Head in the Clouds and Your Feet on the Ground
127in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 3-5). In the cognitive
linguistic view, metaphor is defined as understanding one conceptual
domain (A) in terms of another conceptual domain (B) (Kövecses, 2002:
4). Mapping is a process where experience from the source domain is
mapped onto the target domain, making the relatively abstract target
domain more concrete (Kövecses, 2002: 6).
Thus, on the one hand, conceptual metaphors are forms of organizing
conceptual structure. On the other hand, however, they are basic cognitive
tools that allow our interaction with the environment in which we live.
Without conceptual metaphors, we would not be able to acquire
knowledge and penetrate such complicated subjects as that of financial
management. Still, one must bear in mind that in the case of specialist
languages, conceptual metaphors are imprinted not only in the purely
linguistic output – terminology – but also in the specialist knowledge and
professional practices involved.
Conceptual metaphors are undoubtedly ubiquitous in all spheres of
human activity and constitute a key factor in understanding any natural
language text.^1 Nevertheless, the identification of conceptual metaphors
and other elements claimed to make part of the conceptual structure has
always been a big methodological challenge in metaphor research. The
primary reason might be that the conceptual (onomasiological) plane,
although more stable than the semantic (semasiological) plane, is by
definition subjective, context-dependent and therefore subject to changes,
constant remodeling, shifts in reference. There have been, however,
various proposals aiming at making the process of metaphor identification
more objective. Most of these attempts have focused on automatic or semi-
automatic analysis of big electronic corpus data. In these approaches,
corpora are used quantitatively to extract information on frequency,
although they can also be used to identify metaphorical patterns in a
language sample, which was convincingly argued by Stefanowitsch (2006)
in the metaphorical pattern analysis he conducted.
However, despite numerous methodological benefits, there are still
some serious obstacles to corpus research. Notice that conceptual
metaphors are usually accessed through pre-selected lexical items, while
many metaphors are not easily connected with a particular source domain
or the corresponding conceptual metaphor on the lexical level and cannot
be retrieved automatically. This is especially well visible in the case of
specialist languages where terminology very often functions quite
(^1) Now it is also generally agreed that metaphor pervades the terminology of all
specialist language domains (Ureña Gómez-Moreno 2011, Grygiel 2015,
Herrmann and Sardinha 2015).