Cognitive Perspective of Lexical Metaphor in Scientific Language

Abstract

Contemporary metaphor research offers a cognitive view to help understand the existence of metaphor used in scientific language. Different from literary metaphor, used as a decorative device, lexical metaphor in scientific language has its unique features. And it serves not decorative function any more, but naming function, exegetical or pedagogical function and theory-constitutive function. With the understanding of reasons of lexical metaphor used in scientific language, people can have a deeper understanding of language and its metaphorical uses. Index Terms - lexical metaphor, cognition, scientific language, function I. Introduction The study on metaphors has been going on for thousands of years since Aristotle. The fundamental aspect in a metaphor is variation and transference of a word meaning. The metaphor at this level is called lexical metaphor. For the reason that metaphor is traditionally taken as a decorative device, lexical metaphors are avoided in scientific language. However, this is a reality that lexical metaphors exist even in abundance in scientific language, such as virus in computer science and appendix in medicine science. How could metaphors occur in scientific language and whats special about them? New perspectives of metaphor can offer appropriate explanations for the existence of lexical metaphors in scientific language. II. Contemporary Metaphor Research The rising and development of modern linguistics set the basis for contemporary metaphor theories. Different views of these theories differ mainly in their regard or disregard for the cognitive function of metaphor and the two kinds of views are entitled by Ortony (1993) and Kittay (1987) with the terms constructivism and nonconstructivism.