Metaphors in scientific discourse: some observations on a Nobel lectures corpus

: This paper aims at describing the role and the different manifestations of metaphor in scientific discourse, drawing a distinction between creative and conventional metaphors. To this end, a corpus composed of nineteen Nobel lectures, delivered by nineteen women, will be analysed by means of the critical discourse analysis theoretical and methodological tool, with particular attention to the framing that metaphor produced in scientific discourse. Our analysis shows that scientific discourse tends to privilege conventional metaphors, rather than creative ones, above all as far as the main shared domain concepts are concerned.


Science: creativity and convention
The role of metaphor in scientific discourse has always fascinated scholars and specialists from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, some of them far apart (among others, see Brown, 2003, for an exhaustive overview of this issue). The studies within the sociology of science highlight the modelling power of metaphor in the creation of new scientific theories, and the impact at the level of framing (Fairclough and Wodak, 2007) that metaphorical expression can produce in the figuration of scientific theories and concepts.
However, the richness and complexity of metaphorical expressions in scientific languages are often at risk of being underestimated and described in a limited way. This phenomenon is due to several factors, among which the "cognitive turn" of cognitive linguistics is not the least important. The cognitivist approach to metaphors in fact privileges above all conventional linguistic expressions that derive from shared conceptual metaphors, relegating creative, isolated metaphors that do not correspond to coherence criteria resulting from consensus of the majority of the speech community to a secondary role.
This creates a discrepancy between the metaphors that are analysed, studied and favoured by the cognitivist approach (the "metaphors we live by", to borrow the title of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's founding and celebrated work, published in 1980), and the creative, conflicting metaphors, which nonetheless exist not only in literary discourse, but also (alive and kicking…) in scientific discourse.
In fact, metaphor takes on a great variety of forms and manifestations in scientific language, ranging from the simple denominative catachresis to the most imaginative personal creations (Rossi, 2022); metaphors find a wide palette of realisations in the sciences, all of which share a set of common criteria, but are differentiated on the basis of social, semiotic and cultural factors: 6 Rossi, M. Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014. Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 48, n. 91, p. 4-22, jan./abr. http://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/signo

RESEARCH IS A QUEST Early protein engineers struggled mightily with this goal
The challenge therefore is to discover protein sequences that provide new benefits and deliver novel improvements on a thrifty scale of weeks, rather than millennia or eons, and with the help of one graduate student rather than that of an army. To outperform Nature, I needed a strategy that sidesteps the despair of the Babel librarians.
Beneficial mutations found by directed evolution are often far from the site of catalysis. Even today we struggle to explain their effects, and are unable to predict them reliably or easily NATURE IS AN ENGINEER Nature, herself a brilliant chemist and by far the best engineer of all time, invented life that has flourished for billions of years under an astonishing range of conditions. I am in awe of the exquisite specificity and efficiency with which Nature assembles these products from simple, abundant, and renewable starting materials.
Equally awe-inspiring is the process by which Nature created these enzyme catalysts and in fact everything else in the biological world. The process is evolution, the grand diversity-generating machine that created all life on earth, starting more than three billion years ago NATURE IS A FARMER Natural selection picks the wheat from the chaff and guides mutating proteins along continuously functional paths through the vast space of sequences mostly devoid of function. GENETIC MATERIAL IS A CODE I dream of the day that much of our chemistry becomes genetically encodable, and microorganisms and plants are our programmable factories 1 Unfortunately, this is still true: today we can for all practical purposes read, write, and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.
We used common microbes like Escherichia coli or yeast to produce 'libraries' of mutant enzymes to test for desired functions Rossi, M. Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014 In this lecture, we can find the same conventional/creative metaphorical dynamics: see for example the interplay and the cross-talk between DC, NK and T-cells in HIV infection. We can also remark the presence of a conventional well-known conceptual metaphor in medicine, illness is war (Sontag, 1978): Rossi, M. Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014 Thus the telomere itself was a like a gatekeeper, regulating access of telomerase onto the telomere, even in the presence of excess telomerase in the cells As described above, abrogating telomerase in otherwise effectively "immortal" single-celled species causes progressive telomere shortening over several cell generations followed by cessation of cell division ("senescence"). TELOMERE IS A BEE SWARM Rather than being a rock-stable complex, it is perhaps reminiscent of a swarm of bees: the size and shape of the swarm overall appears the same, but in reality its composition is constantly changing as the bees (the telomeric proteins) of the swarm constantly come off it and are replaced by other bees. As in other lectures of our corpus, the creative pole is devoted to the research concept, whereas conventional metaphors appear for scientific terminology: The side branch of experimental neuroembryology, which had stemmed out from the common tree and was entirely devoted to the study of the trophic interrelations between neuronal cell populations and between these and the innervated organs and tissues, was then in its initial vigorous growth phase RESEARCH IS A QUEST It in turn suffered from a sharp decrease in the enthusiasm that had inflamed the pioneers in this field… CELL IS  Our present knowledge would suggest that these reorganizations originated from some "shock" that forced the genome to restructure itself in order to overcome a threat to its survival cells are able to sense the presence in their nuclei of ruptured ends of chromosomes, and then to activate a mechanism that will bring together and then unite these ends, one with another […] the sensitivity of cells to all that is going on within them. They make wise decisions and act upon them Proof that entrance of a newly ruptured end of a chromosome into a telophase nucleus can initiate activations of previously silent genomic elements These deviations are sensed in each daughter cell It was this event that, basically, was responsible for activations of potentially transposable elements that are carried in a silent state in the maize genome DNA IS A PEARL NECKLACE Genes were "beads" arranged in linear order on the chromosome "string."

May-Britt Moser, "Grid Cells, Place Cells and Memory", 2014
The usual scheme appears in this lecture. We find more creative metaphors to define the research concept, and conventional metaphorical terminology for specialised concepts:

Conclusions -Visions of Science and Research
Some conclusions, albeit partial, to conclude this first exploratory study can be formulated as follows: 1. it is noticeable that conventional metaphors in the analysed scientific fields are widely shared, and point to fundamental concepts in the history of physics, chemistry, physiology: metaphors such as cells are people, genetic material is a code, the human body is a machine, are now deeply embedded in conceptualisations and terminologies. It is therefore evident that they are widely shared in the lectures analysed; 2. it appears rare that the authors go so far as to create new metaphors from these conceptualisations. This happens in a few cases, but it can be assumed that the manipulation of concepts that form the backbone of the specialist domain is a risky operation for the legitimacy of the researcher, and therefore very sporadic; 3. aspects of (limited) creativity seem to be confined to concepts outside the specific scientific domain; in particular, more creativity is noted around the concept of research (see in this regard Bucchi et al., 2019), defined with metaphors related to the enigma, the perilous journey, the quest, or even wandering in the fog. Such creativity never or hardly ever exceeds, however, the frame of the event. The rare cases of novel metaphor for a scientific concept are those related to the naming or description of the new theory presented in the lecture (shell model, laser hammer) Some aspects worthy of investigation remain to verify; among others: the diachronic evolution of metaphors in a specific domain; the gender variation, if any, in lectures and, last but not least, the linguistic factor. The lectures that are presented on the Nobel Prize's official website are in fact almost all in English, the lingua franca of scientific communication. However, this linguistic standardisation also represents a sort of bias in the analysis of the metaphors, conceptual interactions which are profoundly linked to the scientific imaginary of the culture to which they belong (Bordet, 2016, for an interesting in-depth study on this crucial point).