Lexical metaphor in verbal and mental structures in popular science news

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify and to describe lexical metaphors in dominant and dependent projected clauses in 30 popular science news selected from BBC News International and Scientific American, corpus of a master’s research (SANTOS, 2010). In this research, the analysis of transitivity (Halliday, 2004) was performed in order to establish the structures specified by each process and the meanings which are typical to them. When these meanings are built in a non-literal (non-congruent) way we have a lexical metaphor, caused by the semantic tension between the process and participant(s) and that can be identified as: metaphor (relation of similarity between the terms); metonymy (contiguity relation between terms); personification (description of inanimate beings as having human abilities/characteristics). The results point to a major occurrence of metaphor, followed by metonymy and by personification. Metaphors showed varied semantic fields, the most common related to war and engineering. The most recurrent metonymies were the kind in which studies, reports and results were named to the detriment of its researchers (research by researcher) and the kind that research institutions as well as health or government institutions were named instead their responsible members (institution by responsible), depersonalizing the subjects. These cases were generally also characterized as personifications, in which researches and institutions became agents which create and spread scientific knowledge.