Chapter Twelve
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expressions found,^4 the collection of examples seemed to be an obvious
case of conceptual metaphor.^5 However, in attempting to account for this
relationship in terms of the CMT, we encountered the issue of pre-existing
similarities and resemblance-based nature of some of the mappings, as
mentioned in Section 2.
As demonstrated by Excerpts (1)-(4), a frequent type of metaphorical
mapping between these two domains is instantiated by a term originally
standing for a part of human body that is used figuratively to refer to a
machine part:
(1) Two cylinders operate armsthat open and close to grab the root ball,
and the third cylinder operates a foot that adjusts to the diameter of the
root ball, providing a third contact point when grabbing the root ball.
(2) These fittings are made for use with galvanized steel threaded pipes
and they are available in a wide range as elbows, bends, reducers, tees,
plugs, nipples and other.
(3) One special feature of Rexroth deep sea cylinder design is the pressure
compensated cylinder head.
(4) Kidney-shaped cavities in this sector, on both sides of the teeth, accept
fluid to fill them for 180° around the inlet side.As we pointed out in Section 2, it would be difficult – if not impossible- to argue for an absolute conceptual irrelevance between the entities in
the source domain and those in the target domain. In other words, the teeth
of a wheel are most likely labeled as such because of their pointed shape
and sharpness, the elbow of a pipe because of its bent shape, a nipple by its
protruding property and function of liquid secretion, arms because of their
prolonged shape and executive function, and so on.
(^4) Here follows an alphabetical list of seventeen metaphorical expressions found in
the corpus, with the respective token frequencies stated in parentheses: arm
(496.04 per million); bleed (400.65 per million); breathe (9.23 per million);
breather (35.70 per million); choke (35.08 per million); dead (12.92 per million);
elbow (24.00 per million); fatigue (31.39 per million); feed (128.01 per million);
head (314.49 per million); jaw/s (12.31 per million); life (239.40 per million);
nipple (20.31 per million); starvation (1.23 per million); starve (1.85 per million);
throttle (105.24 per million); tooth/teeth (188.94 per million).
(^5) Conducive to this interpretation is also the fact that the source domain, HUMAN
BODY, is a prototypical source according to CMT. We tend to think about more
abstract, complicated things in terms of our bodily experience because (we feel)
our bodies are known and familiar entities (Kövecses 2002).