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active and spew forth lava and rocks’ for belch (WordNet Thesaurus),
revealed a figurative connection between human body parts (mouth,
throat, belly) and biological materials and fluids (food, saliva, stomach
gases), on the one hand, and volcano parts and activity (eruption of lava,
magma, gases, rocks, fumes, and fire), on the other. The motivation for
metaphorical transfer is the comparison in shape and behavior/function
between both human mouth/throat/belly and volcano crater, vent and
magma chamber —specifically, the way a fluid or solid material is
expelled out of an orifice. The set of metaphorical comparisons between
the units from the HUMAN BODY and VOLCANO conceptual domains were
visually rendered following the representational model of metaphoric
thought proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g. Lakoff and
Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff 1993), which involves cross-domain
mappings of concepts from one domain (the source) to another (the target).
Finally, the corpus data showed that the terms designating volcano
materials ejected out of a crater (fire, flame, lava, magma, gases, and
rocks) collocate indiscriminately with volcano verbs. The exception is
dribble, which only entails saliva-like fluids (magma, lava, molten rocks),
not gas-like fluids (smoke, fumes, gases), ashes or fire (flames). By
contrast, these verbs, when carrying general meaning, are discriminating
units in certain cases. For example, belch does not imply food and spit
does not entail gases.
References
Alexiev, B. 2005. Towards an Experientialist Model of Terminological
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Barmin, A. and O.É. Mel'nik. 1993. Eruption dynamics of high-viscosity
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Buendía-Castro, M., S. Montero-Martínez and P. Faber. 2014. “Verb
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Bulard, F. 2013. “Volcanos and their Activity”. In Sheets, P. and D.K.
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