CHAPTER TWELVE
METAPHOR IN TERMINOLOGY:
A CASE STUDY OF HUMAN BODY TERMS
IN THE DOMAIN OF HEAVY MACHINERY
IVANA KRÁLIKOVÁ AND WEI-LUN LU
Introduction
The role of figurative language in scientific and technical discourse has
been discussed in both works on metaphor and terminology studies (Kuhn
1979; Felber 1984; Temmerman 2000; Tercedor Sánchez, López
Rodríguez, Márquez Linares & Faber 2012; Tretjakova 2013). Metaphor
has been recognized as a significant source of new lexical units within
specialized language fields with their constant demand for labeling new
concepts, as an effective means of introducing such concepts and
facilitating the understanding of unknown theoretical models. Recent
works on the issue (Temmerman 2000; Tercedor Sánchez, et. al. 2012)
have stressed the role of conceptual metaphor in creative thinking which
enables us to understand and interpret new phenomena in specialized
fields, thus enhancing the development of scientific thought.
In the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff
1993; Kövecses 2002, hereafter CMT), conceptual metaphor is considered
a powerful cognitive mechanism that drives much of figurative language
use and pervades human conceptual system. Metaphorical expressions,
which are relatively abundant in everyday language, are linguistic
manifestations of conceptual metaphors that exist in our minds and
systematically shape the way we think about reality and abstract notions in
particular. These abstract notions, such as TIME, IDEAS or LOVE, do not
have a clear delineation and thus can only be understood metaphorically,
i.e. in terms of other concepts that we are able to comprehend more
clearly. For instance, by mapping a concrete, familiar experiential domain
such as JOURNEY onto a very abstract conceptual domain such as LOVE, we