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POPULAR SCIENCE CONCEPTS AND THEIR USE IN CREATIVE METAPHORS IN MEDIA DISCOURSE
Wissenschaftliche Lexeme werden im Mediendiskurs so vielseitig und kreativ verwendet, dass ihre fachterminologische Herkunft oft aus dem Blick gerät. Der Ausdruck Dinosaurier ist hierfür ein gutes Beispiel: Dinosaurier sind zum Ikon der Unterhaltungsindustrie geworden und der Ausdruck wird in Medientexten zumeist metaphorisch verwendet. Auf der Basis von englischsprachigen Korpusdaten untersucht der Aufsatz Metaphern, in denen der ‚Dinosaurier’-Begriff als Bildspender fungiert, speziell im Hinblick auf ihre Verwendung in „Fabel“-ähnlichen Szenarios, die als Schlussfolgerung eine „Moral“ enthalten, die auf einem eng begrenzten Inventar von Präsuppositionen über das „Schicksal“ der Dinosaurier beruht (im wesentlichen: dass Dinosaurier genante Wesen aussterben „müssen“). Es wird gezeigt, dass selbst in solchen Texten, in denen diese Annahmen explizit negiert werden, sie von der textsemantischen Analyse berücksichtigt werden müssen, da nur so die aus dem semantischen Widerspruch resultierenden kognitiven und pragmatischen „Blending“Effekte hinreichend analysiert werden können. Media discourse continuously makes creative and eclectic use of science terminology – often to the point of contradicting the views of scientific experts on the subject matter in question. One such instance is the case of dinosaurs which have become prominent icons in popular culture, as well as favourite metaphors in various media discourse domains. Using corpusbased data from (English-language) public discourse, the paper explores metaphors based on the source-concept of DINOSAUR, which are characterized by creative elaborations that expand the basic source-target mapping into fables or ‘stories with a moral lesson’. It is argued that in order to explicate such innovative meaning construction, the conceptual analysis of metaphor that focuses on basic mappings needs to be complemented by an approach that accommodates “blended scenarios” that are not deducible from either the source or the target inputs and constitute emergent semantic structure. It will also be shown, however, that there are constraints to this innovation potential in the form of source-based default assumptions about ‘prototypical’ source aspects (e.g., that dinosaurs were/are victims of extinction). Even if these assumptions are violated in a specific metaphor blend, they represent the standard by which the blended scenario is judged to be extraordinary, ironic, or in other ways pragmatically marked. 1. Metaphoric blends and their constraints An influential reader on cognitive metaphor theory, which was published in 1985, had as its title The Ubiquity of Metaphor (Paprotté and Dirven 1985). Since the 1980s, it has not only become a commonplace in cognitive linguistics to 1 I would like to thank Mary Fender, Brigitte Nerlich, Michael White and Jörg Zinken for helpful comments on draft versions of this article. I am greatly indebted to Wolfgang Teubert and Pernilla Danielsson at the University of Birmingham who gave generously of their support in collecting data from the Bank of English corpus. metaphorik.de 13/2007 68 emphasize the all-pervading presence and influence of metaphor in language and thought and in the social practices ‘we live by’ but also the ubiquity of further semantic phenomena that used to be relegated to the realm of especially weird and wonderful rhetorical devices, such as metonymies, allegories, counterfactuals (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Barcelona 2000, Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Dirven and Pörings 2003). Since the advent of Cognitive Blending Theory, the combination of the theory of “mental spaces” with a dynamic model of “integration networks” of varying complexity, the analysis of creative concept construction in discourse has been given a further boost. Multiple semantic fusion effects, as in the counterfactual statement If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink, or in the depiction of Death as the Grim Reaper (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 218-221; Turner and Fauconnier 2003: 476-482), have been shown to result from an interplay of metaphoric and metonymic integration). A particular characteristic of blending theory is that in the “mental space” model, semantic “material is projected from both the source and target spaces to the blend” (Grady, Oakley and Coulson 1999: 103); in other words, it allows metaphor theory to account for the construction of new meaning that incorporates aspects of both input and target spaces without being ontologically compatible with either of them. Thus, in the ‘Clinton-iceberg’ example, the two mappings, ‘Clinton : Titanic’ and ‘[Victim of scandal] : iceberg’, can only be understood against the background of a) the presupposed historical narrative of the ill-fated ship voyage and b) “crucial causal structure and event shape structure” of the scandals engulfing US President Clinton” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 221-222). The respective disaster and success outcomes of the inputs are not just incompatible with each other but, on account of their combination in a counterfactual blend, the resulting cognitive dissonance achieves a rhetorically creative effect. Thanks to the knowledge that the historical ship Titanic did in fact sink and that sinking is normally impossible for icebergs, the reader can savour the special effect of the hyperbolic inference that Clinton’s political survival techniques apparently defied even the laws of nature. Whilst the explanatory power of blending theory is evident for reconstructions of innovative semantic integration phenomena, we may ask what constraints there are upon the apparently open-ended possibilities of mutual influence Musolff, Popular science concepts and their use in creative metaphors 69 between semantic “spaces” in complex metaphoric blends. One main constraint is relatively obvious: target space aspects that are essential for the intended meaning must be preserved ‘at the expense’, so to speak, of the source input. Thus, with regard to the above quoted Clinton-iceberg example, the knowledge of Clinton’s political survival provides the ‘benchmark’ for the interpretation of what happens to the Titanic and the iceberg in the blend. These constraints were accounted for in the conceptual metaphor theory by a corollary of the “Invariance Principle”, which stated “that image-schema structure inherent in the target domain cannot be violated, and that inherent target domain structure limits the possibilities of mappings automatically” (Lakoff 1993: 216). In the terminology of blending theory this conclusion could be reformulated as an assertion that the knowledge “schemas” that are made accessible by the target input inform the access to schemas for the source input and, if necessary, override their “cognitive topology”. But are there comparable constraints that can be associated with the source input? Or is it a case of ‘anything goes’? What happens to our everyday knowledge about icebergs or other natural kinds, when we imagine they might be sinkable (or attain any quality they normally do not have)? In this paper, some tentative answers for these questions will be formulated on the basis of a special corpus of metaphorical uses of the term dinosaur in the English-speaking press, which was assembled from the Bank of English corpus.2 As a first step, all texts containing the expression dinosaur were sampled from the Bank of English: this primary collection comprised some 4500 separate text passages (of up to one hundred words each) that amounted altogether to more than 380,000 words. Subsequently, all references to the scientific findings about the ‘real’ dinosaurs and all references to modern simulated reincarnations in the form of museum exhibits, film monsters or toys were excluded. The remaining sample comprises more than 900 text entries, in 2 Cf. www.titania.bham.ac.uk/ (accessed on 28 November 2007) for the Bank of English corpus, which is jointly owned by HarperCollins Publishers and the University of Birmingham and is in parts publicly accessible. In 2005, the corpus stood at 450 million words and it is continuously updated and being added to. It contains written texts from newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, brochures, leaflets, reports and letters, as well as transcriptions of conversation, radio broadcasts, meetings, interviews and discussions, etc. For its use in metaphor research cf. Deignan 1995 and 2005, Moon 1998, Musolff 2004 and Charteris-Black 2004. metaphorik.de 13/2007 70 which the topics are referred to as dinosaurs or compared to dinosaurs, whilst the respective context does not sustain a literal interpretation as the primary sense. The analysis can therefore operate on the working hypothesis that the dinosaur references here are metaphorical. As the sample has not yet been comprehensively annotated, a quantitative analysis remains to be conducted. Experimental data about processing time and interpretation techniques across groups of subjects are not available. The data presented here are therefore meant to serve as an exemplary survey over the range of conceptualizations in dinosaur metaphors.
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