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Proceedings of the 37Th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), Pp UC Berkeley Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society Title The World Meets the Body: Sociocultural Aspects of Terminological Metaphor Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b38g5k2 Journal Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 37(37) ISSN 2377-1666 Authors Ureña, José Manuel Faber, Pamela Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The world meets the body: Sociocultural aspects of terminological metaphor Author(s): José Manual Ureña and Pamela Faber Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 359-374 Editors: Chundra Cathcart, I-Hsuan Chen, Greg Finley, Shinae Kang, Clare S. Sandy, and Elise Stickles Please contact BLS regarding any further use of this work. BLS retains copyright for both print and screen forms of the publication. BLS may be contacted via http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/. The Annual Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society is published online via eLanguage, the Linguistic Society of America's digital publishing platform. The World Meets the Body: Sociocultural Aspects of Terminological Metaphor JOSÉ MANUEL UREÑA and PAMELA FABER Department of Translation and Interpreting University of Granada, Spain Introduction The experientalist view of the embodied mind is condensed in Gibbs (1999:155) affirmation that cognition is what happens when the body meets the world. Yet, it is also necessary to ask what happens when the world meets the body. In our opinion, conceptual metaphor analysis, whatever the knowledge field, is traceable to both sensory-motor inferences and cultural factors. On this basis, this paper analyzes a number of resemblance metaphor term pairs in English and Spanish, which were extracted from a text corpus of marine biology academic journals. Drawing on the examination of these terms, we propose a classification of meta- phors that arranges them according to their level of socio-cognitive situatedness. This classification shows that sensorimotor perception and sociocultural factors merge into a physical-social experience that shapes scientific knowledge through metaphor, and that sociocognitive patterns involved in terminological metaphor formation give rise to inter-linguistic variation and commonalities. As introductory background, let us briefly discuss the connection between bodily aspects and sociocultural aspects in Cognitive Linguistics. It should be highlighted that the relationship between both aspects has been a matter of controversy within this theoretical tradition. One body of research approaches metaphor from a purely neurophysiological and neurocomputational viewpoint. A case in point is Lakoff and colleagues Neural Theory of Language, which is being developed in a range of parallel research works (cf. Dodge and Lakoff 2005, Feldman 2006). This strand downplays sociocultural factors involved in (metaphor-induced) embodied conceptualization, and focuses on the analysis of metaphor and other cognitive phenomena in terms of neural models, neural circuits, axonal firings and parietal-hippocampal networks. This strand of research, which focuses on embodiment and on the biophysical 359 José Manuel Ureña and Pamela Faber underpinnings of thought lately seems to be overshadowed by the second body of research, which highlights the situated nature of metaphor (cf. Gibbs 1999, Kövecses 2005, 2006, Yu 2008). Such research is also advocated by metaphor analysts in neighbouring disciplines, such as cognitive and psychological anthro- pology (cf. Kimmel 2008; Palmer 1996). The point is that many scholars opt for a metaphor description model that integrates both bodily and cultural experiences. A good example is Kövecses (2005), whose contrastive study of English, Hungarian, and Spanish provides evidence of the existence of non-universal metaphors. These are motivated by sociocultural factors (including environmen- tal, historical, and communicational aspects) and cognitive preferences and styles, including processes such as elaboration, focusing, and conventionalisation. Kövecses (2005:231) concludes that both types of parameters cannot be separated from each other, but rather work jointly. 1 Metaphor, Science, and Culture The body-culture mergence has also found its way into science. It is now argued that the concrete sociocultural situatedness of individual language agents inevita- bly leads them to employ interpretive conceptualizations that are partial, ie. not shared by all of the members of the expert scientific community in question (Frank 2008:218). Sociocognitive Terminology Theory (Temmerman 2000) pioneered research into the way metaphor models life science knowledge as a consequence of the ongoing social, cognitive, and technological advances in Western civilization. However, studies focusing on the interplay of physiological and cultural patterns have typically shown a preference for non-resemblance metaphors, in other words, metaphors that emerge from rich and abstract structures not involv- ing physical or behavioral patterns (Lakoff and Turner 1989:91). As a conse- quence, resemblance metaphors, which arise because of comparison in physical appearance (typically shape, color, and size) or behavior, were left more or less out in the cold. For example, Larson (2008) elaborates on the biological, cultural, and linguistic origin of the war on invasive species within the domain of invasion biology, a subdiscipline of conservation biology concerned with strategies to maintain biodiversity. Larson identifies the macro-metaphors NATURAL LAND- SCAPES ARE PERSONS, INVASION SPECIES ARE A DISEASE, and INVASION SPECIES ARE HUMAN INVADERS, and examines their historical and cultural bases. The main reason for this preference is that resemblance metaphor was regard- ed by Lakoff and others as a fleeting kind of metaphor with an impoverished inner structure (Lakoff 1993, Lakoff and Turner 1989). Consequently, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has traditionally limited the treatment of resemblance meta- phors to literature and poetry within Cognitive Poetics (e.g. Lakoff 1993, Lakoff and Turner 1989, Stockwell 2002). 360 Sociocultural Aspects of Terminological Metaphor Fortunately, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in resemblance metaphor. Corpus-based research both in general language (Deignan 2007) and specialized discourse (Caballero 2006 in architecture, Ureña and Faber 2010 in marine biology) shows that resemblance metaphors are well-established, conven- tional metaphors that arise from enduring and productive patterns of figurative thought, and that they are not only subscribed to literature, but also to general and specialized language. Nevertheless, research offering a systematic approach to the body-culture conflation in terminological resemblance metaphor from a cross-linguistic per- spective is long overdue. The translation-oriented work by Alexiev (2005) opens the door to this line of investigation. He carries out a corpus-based contrastive analysis of resemblance metaphor terms in Bulgarian, English, and Spanish in the fields of mining, geology, civil engineering, and architecture. Alexiev (2005:36) points out that the choice of a target language conceptualization strategy and a subsequent translation technique are determined not only by cognitive, but also by language- and culture-specific factors. On this basis, Alexiev (2005:108-115) establishes a set of culture-experiential parameters which determine the choice of the designation, and thereby, the general concept to be exploited in the termino- logical metaphorization process. 2 Method 2.1 Justification This paper sheds light onto the relationship between the physical and the sociocul- tural underpinnings of terminological resemblance metaphor, an aspect that has hardly been researched. For this purpose, this study revises Alexievs (2005) proposal, and suggests a typology of culture-induced marine biology metaphors arranged according to four criteria: culture-specificity, culture-typicality, the angles of referent perception, and degree of specificity. 2.2 Materials and Procedures The framework is a contrastive study between English and Spanish resemblance metaphor terms extracted from a bilingual text corpus of marine biology academic journals. The nature of this corpus ensures the analysis of authentic, naturally occurring data. According to Charteris-Black (2004:19), corpus evidence helps the user to detect cases of inactive conventional metaphors and compensate for the arbitrariness of dictionaries. This corpus was already used in a previous study (Ureña and Faber 2011), where we present an innovative methodology for the semi-automatic retrieval of resemblance metaphor term pairs in English and Spanish. In the first phase of the 361 José Manuel Ureña and Pamela Faber methodology, the corpus was searched for target domain keywords in English and Spanish, such as fish/pez, sea/de mar, and crab/cangrejo. The great potential of this strategy has been documented in previous research (cf. Stefanowitsch 2006), but never applied to scientic texts. Secondly, a search was made for a set of lexical markers that are typical of scientic discourse. These markers include phrases such as known as and conocido/a como, and importantly, taxonomic designations, which are standard Latin names written in italics (e.g. Portunus pelagicus) and used by all scientists around the world. Taxonomic designations were important for resemblance metaphor
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