CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STYLISTIC DEVICES AND METAPHORICAL
CREATIVITY IN POPULAR SCIENCE HEADLINES
IN ENGLISH AND POLISH:
A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVE
MARTA BOàTUû
Introduction
The domain of broadly understood specialist languages can include
popular science texts. In a similar vein, headlines of these texts can be
treated as a specific case of specialist language, since their distinctive
function is the metatextual function (Nord 1993), which ensures that a
headline is about a specific text/co-text or has some relation with it. The
following chapter discusses stylistic devices and novel/creative metaphors,
as distinguished from conventional metaphors, from the perspective of
cognitive linguistics, Fauconnier and Turner’s (1998) blending theory in
particular. The analysis conducted by the author is corpus based (headlines
of National Geographic and National Geographic Polska articles from
January 2013 to December 2014 are taken into account), it is both
qualitative (the metaphorical expressions are divided into compound
expression and phrases, for example) and quantitative, and the material has
been processed manually.
The author claims that blending theory, by allowing for more than two
input spaces, being not directional and focusing on on-line processing of
the novel expressions is better equipped, than CMT (conceptual metaphor
theory), to describe and understand the dynamic nature of metaphors in
National Geographic discourse. Conceptual blending theory allows us to
drop the old idea of concepts as static structures in long-term memory in
favour of dynamically constructed models (metaphors in this case) usually
determined by the co-text or contextual cues.