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Part of
How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science
Edited by Anke Beger and Thomas H. Smith
[Figurative Thought and Language 6] 2020
► pp. 141–173

Chapter 5
To be or not to be: Reconsidering the metaphors of apoptosis in press popularisation articles

| University of Cantabria
This chapter examines the metaphorical expressions used to explain apoptosis in press popularisations. The study was performed on a bilingual English-Spanish subset of 58 texts on apoptosis identified from a corpus of 300 cancer articles published in The Guardian, The Times, El País and El Mundo. The analysis shows that most metaphors coincide with those found in scientific articles and there are few creative explanatory images in the English and Spanish popularisations. The English articles make greater use of the suicide image whereas the Spanish texts rely more on variants based on “cell death” and “die”. In certain contexts, some metaphors are ambiguous and confuse rather than clarify the process while others might not be considered the most appropriate choices.
Keywords: apoptosis, metaphor, popularisations, recontextualisation, press, corpus studies, English, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Apoptosis
  • 3.Cell death metaphorical expressions in specialised genres
    • 3.1Programmed cell death
    • 3.2Cell suicide
    • 3.3Cell death
  • 4.Materials and methods
    • 4.1Corpus
    • 4.2Metaphor identification
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Quantitative analysis of metaphors of apoptosis
    • 5.2Analysis of a sample text
    • 5.3Problematic examples
    • 5.4Creative examples
  • 6.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 22 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.6.05wil
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