Metaphors in medical english prose: A comparative study with French and Spanish

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to determine the patterns of analogy underlying medically terminologized words which carry a metaphorical status. A corpus of medical texts in English, French, and Spanish was studied; the metaphors were recorded and classified according to their analogy patterns (or underlying semantic transfer). Two broad likeness categories were found in the three languages: morphological metaphors, which refer to forms and structures (geomorphical, anatomical, zoomorphical, phytomorphical, and architectural), and physiological (or functional) metaphors, which refer to processes and functions. The results show that the patterns of analogy underlying medical metaphors are language independent and differ from those underlying nonscientific metaphors. A closer linguistic analysis of medical English metaphorical words indicates that the vast majority: (a) belong to the nominal group, (b) modify specialist nouns or adjectives, and (c) are of the nominal-compound type (an additional linguistic difficulty for NNS). Because it is well known that nontechnical vocabulary used in technical ways is a source of difficulty for NNS, pedagogical guidelines are also provided so as to encourage students to relate new vocabulary to existing knowledge structures.