Science on Twitter and the ecological construction of meaning: enemies between defense and attack, between victory and defeat, when we can live by the metaphor of war

Abstract

We present the results of a study that aimed to reflect on the use of the metaphor of WAR in the conceptualization of science. Assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, employed from the establishment of dialogues with authors such as Lakoff (1996), Croft and Cruse (2008), Kövecses (2017), Silva (2008), among others, theoretically supported the research undertaken which had a qualitative nature and was carried out through the descriptive and interpretive approach of the corpus, which, in turn, consisted of linguistic expressions collected from posts published on Twitter, between 2020 and 2022. After the completion of the study, it was found that, in this metaphorical conceptualization, different frames of the WAR domain occurred, such as VICTORY and DEFEAT. The activation of these different frames allowed variation in the way of conceptualizing science and in the way of linguistically materializing this conceptualization.