Metaphors in the Languages of Science

Scholars in LSP studies have the gift of prescience – the discussions about the conceptual organization of the terminology of a domain, started nearly a century ago by Eugene Wüster, have a clear resonance with the discussions related to ontology in the current literature in distributed computing, especially in the literature on semantic web. The ever burgeoning web, with texts, images, music and movies, is searched predominantly using ‘keywords’; search engines have large collections of these words used to index texts (and images) such that a user can retrieve the indexed texts using the self-same or similar keywords. The literature on search engine technology has contributions on ontology – literally what there is, a notion that is not alien to the Wüster tradition: any attempts at the organization of concepts requires thought about what there is or is perceived to be. The work in ontology is about creating the conceptual organization for building term collections and about validating terms of a specialist domain. LSP researchers have moved on and are now focusing on how texts are organized by the use of terms and examining the social context of specialist writing. This chapter is about this move and here I would like to examine the use of metaphor in scientific writing. Linguistic metaphors are used extensively in science in particular and specialist writing in general. There are two strands in this chapter: first, a review of work in metaphor studies that