Metaphor in Terminology 265mappings between the domains of LAND ANIMALS and SEA ANIMALS,
which they regard as conceptual metaphor because it involves multiple
mappings, represented linguistically by terms such as seahorse, sea cow or
tiger shark.
This type of logic, however, leads to a potential contradiction. One
could argue that the metaphorical expression seahorse is just as
resemblance-based as sea lettuce – and yet it gets categorized as a
manifestation of an underlying conceptual metaphor because it is
accompanied by other mappings between the same domains. What
Tercedor Sánchez et al. (2012) seem to suggest is that a conceptual
metaphor can be constituted by a set of image metaphors between two
domains, which however is problematic, as the premise of CMT is that a
conceptual metaphor is supposed to involve no pre-existing similarities.
What makes the entire case difficult – and also substantially different from
metaphors dealt with in Lakoff and Johnson (1980) or Kövecses (2002) –
is that it involves two very tangible, physical domains of experience
instead of one tangible source and one abstract target. Although the
conceptual metaphor literature does not explicitly state that the target
domain must necessarily be of abstract (non-tangible) nature, this is
typically the case with the examples Lakoff and Johnson (1980) use to lay
down the theory (e.g. LOVE IS A JOURNEY, THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS,
ARGUMENT IS WAR) and seems to be a central assumption of CMT.
Tangible target domains in terminological metaphors such as SEA ANIMALS
pose a difficulty to the theory because they do not lack clear delineation in
the same way as the domain of LOVE does – they have a fairly clear
structure simply by virtue of physically existing in space. In this paper, we
will try to describe in more detail the problems surrounding metaphorical
mappings between two tangible domains of experience, more specifically
the difficulties that arise from trying to use CMT to account for these cases
of figurative language in terminology. Working with a specialized
language corpus compiled by the first author into figurative language in
the domain of HEAVY MACHINERY, we argue that these cases are better
interpreted as instances of what Evans (2013) labels discourse metaphor, a
resemblance-based metaphor arising in language use in order to serve
specific linguistic functions, and that the notion of discourse metaphor is
indispensable in analyzing specialist language.
CMT and tangible target domains
The significance of metaphor has been stressed in connection to its ability
to facilitate the conceptualization of abstract entities which would