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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. 175–208

Chapter 6
Non-verbal and multimodal metaphors bring biology into the picture

| Universidad de Granada

The relationship between multimodality and cognitive effects has become an important topic of discussion in Cognitive Linguistics. A growing number of studies explore the multimodal manifestations of figurative thought in a wide range of domains. However, little research has been done on visual and auditory metaphor in science. This chapter examines (i) pictures from a corpus of publications covering different biology subdomains and (ii) video clips that feature animals and biological processes. The corpus includes expert material and popular science resources. Empirical evidence is provided that visuals, non-verbal sounds, and words work either separately or together to construe metaphors, which have a major role in building scientific theories in biology and in communicating these theories to laypeople and learners.

Keywords: nonverbal and multimodal metaphor, biology, expert and non-expert communication, resemblance and non-resemblance metaphors, productivity, effectiveness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Objectives of the study
  • 3.Monomodality
    • 3.1Static images: Pictures
      • 3.1.1Tree metaphors
      • 3.1.2Other pictorial metaphors
      • 3.1.3Summary of contents
    • 3.2Dynamic images: Animal body language
      • 3.2.1The Brazilian wandering spider
      • 3.2.2The Gibb’s sea spider
      • 3.2.3Summary of contents
  • 4.Multimodality
    • 4.1The archerfish
    • 4.2The velvet worm and the harvestman
    • 4.3Summary of contents
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
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.6.06gom
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