Figurative language in academic and professional engineering. Ana Roldán Riejos ... Actually, this is not the only specific technical subject matter in which the ...
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Figurative language in academic and professional engineering Ana Roldán Riejos & Yulia Protasenia Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Abstract Despite research on figurative language use in specialized languages from a cognitive linguistics approach has provided fresh insights for both areas so far (Lakoff & Nuñez 2000; White 2004; Roldán & Úbeda 2006; Roldán 1999) more empirical studies are still needed to consolidate this approach. Following the stance suggested by Deignan 2005 in Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics, this paper describes the use and function of figurative language in a medium-sized corpus taken from engineering research articles. It identifies conceptual metaphors and metonymies that underlie a considerable number of linguistic expressions analysed in the sampling. Thus, the study of the source domains leads us to pointing out the kind of conceptual mappings projected in the categories included in the corpus. The analysis of these data puts forward that most of them have to do with to the importance of control and controlling for engineering actions, and that this notion is conveyed by apparently totally unrelated mappings. Finally, this paper aims to show that the study of conceptual mappings used in the language of engineering can throw light on the way engineers think and communicate in their academic and professional lives and therefore can also help in the engineering students learning process. Keywords: Figurative language; Conceptual metaphor; Engineering communication; LSP learning
Introduction Within figurative language, metaphor in particular was traditionally catalogued as a rhetorical and literary device. In this sense, it has been written that the use of metaphor, amongst other tropes, represents a necessary balance in style, since a totally referential use of language never lasts long (Lantham1976). Accordingly, if words are assumed to have literal and metaphorical meanings, metaphor is represented as a vehicle to provide a counterpart to referential language (one-to-one correspondence). The latter would be more mentally accessible and the former mainly consisting of inferences from the literal (Searle 1979). Thereafter, metaphor and other figurative language were treated as tropes beyond the theory of pragmatics, since implicature rules cannot account for the full range of possible interpretations (Levinson 1983). However, as Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989 have proved in their influential studies, metaphor is a recurrent phenomenon not only in everyday language, but more interestingly, in the way we think. In the cognitive view, metaphor is a means to conceptualise one abstract domain in terms of another more familiar domain of experience, i.e. to understand one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain. It assists in comprehension. It is not a grammatically anomalous phenomenon; on the contrary it is bodily grounded and hence, non-arbitrary. In this paper, we will try to highlight that in the same way as conceptual metaphor and metonymy play an important part in general language conceptual domains; they also form a constituent part of civil engineering conceptual mappings, projecting from the concrete to the abstract. Actually, this is not the only specific technical subject matter in which the prevalence of metaphorical conceptual mappings has been identified. In computing science (Fauconnier 1997), the biological-medical source domain is
499 activated when referring to “virus, quarantine, anti-virus, vaccine”, etc., in the target domain of computer software (more examples in Durán & Roldán forthcoming). Engineering conceptual mappings In a study about academic English and Spanish civil engineering publications, Roldán and Úbeda 2006 manage to pinpoint the presence of metaphors as well as of metonymy and synecdoche in the examples of the engineering literature written in both languages that they examine and typically used in expert-to-expert communication. The metaphorical expressions seem to be connected with the importance of control in engineering. Any type of structure is exposed to tensions, deformations, etc. The civil engineering job is basically to prevent and also to know the possible reasons of these problems and to solve them. Indeed, among the variety of engineering mappings, a prevailing tendency on the importance of control and manipulation in this field has been observed. The civil engineering structure is a patient that has to receive treatment from the expert, i.e. the engineer. The engineer is responsible for the state and the “life” of the structures under his/her supervision. In addition, it has also been suggested (Roldán 1999; Roldán et al. 2001; Santiago forthcoming) that these conceptual mappings appear to be arranged in a sort of hierarchical order that can get expanded on demand. That is to say, a few conceptual mappings are likely to be more outstanding than others, which, in turn, are dependent on them and so can be considered as sub-divisions from a main branch, as shown below. Text evidence on the subject shows that civil engineer (C.E.) structures are frequently described with the following lexical items, among others: A C.E. structure has: Life Behaviour State Movement Reactions Behaviour Performance Age Excitability Resistance Sensitivity Strength Flexibility
TABLE 1. Descriptive features of C.E. structures.
Hence, the general metaphorical mapping formulated from the above will be: (1) A C.E. STRUCTURE IS A BODY
As a result, a civil engineer structure is a contingent entity, which is prone to suffer from physical problems similar to those of any living being. Some of these problems or contingencies, that need to be taken into account in order to be solved, are specified in the following way:
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A C.E. structure undergoes: Aging Stress Strain Bleeding Swelling Weeping Degradation Deterioration Vulnerability Fatigue Fracture Weakness Collapse
Death of C.E. structures. TABLE 2. Common problems
As a result, the following new mappings derived from the above general one emerge: (1.1) A C.E. STRUCTURE IS A PATIENT/ A C.E. STRUCTURE IS MEDICALLY TREATED
(1.1.1) A CIVIL ENGINEER IS A DOCTOR
The linguistic repertoire associated to these conceptualisations is plentiful, for example, we can cite: Pathology; anatomy; critical state; irreversibility
And civil engineers are able to: Diagnose; cure; recuperate; rehabilitate; stabilise; prevent; strengthen; regenerate; save; apply treatment and offer remedial measures.
In turn, the original sub-mappings underlying these metaphors are: CONTROL IS UP; MANIPULATION IS GOOD
We can say that these expressions are based on body experiences that come from activities through relations of similarity/contiguity. That explains why in contrastive analysis of English and Spanish engineering language, metaphorical correspondences are more similar than expected (Roldán & Úbeda 2006) and as will be seen below. The reason is that there are direct experiences that are common to every human being, regardless of their culture (based on the body especially), as the container schema; in/out in a tri-dimensional space, or up/down orientation (Johnson 1987). The importance of the body, of experience and culture is subsumed in concept of “embodiment”, with the general directionality of explanation from the bodily to the abstract (Rohrer 1999, 2005) and interaction with the world. In the next diagram, a summary of these and other frequent engineering mappings and sub-mappings can be seen:
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C.E. STRUCTURES ARE HUMAN BEINGS
ENGINEERING FORCES ARE COUPLES Sub-mapping: STRUCTURES HAVE RELATIONSHIPS
STRUCTURES ARE PATIENTS/ ARE MEDICALLY TREATED
Sub-mappings: CONTROL IS UP; MANIPULATION IS GOOD
ENGINEERS ARE DOCTORS
FIGURE 1. Frequent mappings in C.E.
We can notice the rich and fluent productivity established amongst the mappings, in particular, we are interested now in the mapping AN ENGINEER IS A DOCTOR. As Deignan 2005: 164 explains, it is not always possible to resort to conceptual metaphor to account for the dynamic creation of mappings and corresponding linguistic expressions, in this sense, it is plausible to refer to the concept of blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002), especially as seen in Grady et al. 1999 in their study of the conceptual integration network of A SURGEON IS A BUTCHER. Here, starting from a generic space that breaks into two inputs spaces, a blended space emerges showing shared and new characteristics, as we can see below in figure 2. As Deignan (2005: 222) argues, the creation of a third mental space by a metaphor goes a step beyond conceptual metaphor theory that only concedes that the structure from the target domain comes from the source domain.
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FIGURE 2. Blending: Engineer as doctor.
Methodology and results The examples that follow are taken from a corpus compiled of 81 journal articles of “Revista de Obras Públicas”, which is the official professional channel of chartered Spanish civil engineers (Ingenieros de Canales, Caminos y Puertos). This journal has an electronic version of every published article from 1853. In this case, the articles selected belong to January-December 2004. The electronic tool used to extract concordances, frequencies, clusters etc. was AntConc 2006 software. However, from the total number of obtained word tokens, the categories that were more likely to show the presence of metaphor had to be identified manually, since there is no available software to do this so far. Likewise, their occurrences were electronically checked on the corpus. Once this task was completed, the process of extracting concordances, word clusters and collocations started. Due to the relevance of contextual clues, eliciting file views (see figure 4) was often necessary. In corpus analysis, a distinction is usually made between “corpus-based” and “corpus-driven” research (see Deignan 2005:88-89). In this paper, both approaches have been followed, since we have not started completely from scratch and suggestions from previous studies were considered, but likewise our intention was to bring out data that could lead to new directions in figurative language in this particular field (for a development of this idea applied to gender studies see Santiago forthcoming). Once the categories with a higher frequency on the word list were extracted (see figure 3 below), the results were revealing for the study. Thus, by adding up the citations of the top 8 word tokens likely to surface metaphor, a percentage of over 40% from the
503 total amount of selected tokens (1683) included in the corpus was obtained. The presence of “control” as the most frequent one (228) is significant, given its occurrence in the underlying sub-mapping, CONTROL IS UP, and its direct implication in the medical metaphors discussed above. Similarly, it was followed on the list by “estado”, “comportamiento” and “vida”.
FIGURE 3. Word list of main metaphorical items.
In figure 4, the context of the word token “tratamiento” clearly shows its potential in conceptual metaphor. It actually collocates with other linguistic categories that can be also listed as bearing potential conceptual metaphor, such as “envejecimiento” and “diagnóstico”, highlighted in green. In addition, it shows that the most likely context for the word to occur would be about dams and similar hydraulic structures.
504 FIGURE 4. File view for “Tratamiento”.
On the other hand, a list of concordances for “envejecimiento”, which refers to the actual life span of engineering structures and possible ways to renovate them, can be seen in blue ink in figure 5:
FIGURE 5. Concordances for “envejecimiento”.
Likewise, in the case of “vida”, the word clusters retrieved below particularly highlight the importance of “vida útil” for civil engineering structures, as shown in figure 6. All these cases appear to match the conceptual mappings outlined for English above and are activated unconsciously and effortlessly during engineering communication. What is more important, these metaphoric linguistic expressions are clear reflections of metaphorical thought (Lakoff & Nuñez 2000) and confirm bodily grounded projections on the target engineering domain.
FIGURE 6. Clusters in “vida”.
505 Additionally, the identification of metonymy occurrences in the corpus is also possible. By metonymy we understand the possibility of establishing different connections between entities that co-occur within a given conceptual structure. Let us take “auscultación” as an example, which is a medical detection method consisting of exploring the patient by listening to the sound of the chest or the abdominal cavity. In the engineering case, by “auscultación” methods to detect dam movements through mechanical devices, such as pendulums, are meant. Even though these instruments do not bear relation with the act of listening or with sounds, the dam control realized is metaphorically associated with the medical domain and by extension used metonymically. Thus, the continuum metaphor-metonymy (Goossens et al. 1995) is here evidenced (see figure 7) where various concordances show a metonymic contiguity relation of taking the method (part) for the effect.
FIGURE 8. Concordances for “Auscultación”.
Conclusion This paper underlines the presence of figurative language, particularly reflected in the use of conceptual metaphor in a Spanish written civil engineering corpus. The main aim was to show the nature and the potential of conceptual mappings in this branch of engineering, as seen in a considerable number of examples extracted from the corpus. A considerable number of the citations obtained are associated with the medical source domain and also reveal the importance allocated to the concept of “control” in the civil engineering world. Making explicit the information obtained in this type of studies can be very useful for the engineering student, not only to notice how vocabulary is used and structured in this discipline, but also to become aware of common but unconsciously used mappings within engineering language as well as of the vast possibilities of word meaning. References Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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