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Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction: Multimodal and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Manuela Romano and Maria Dolores Porto
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 262] 2016
► pp. 187–213

Exploring specific differences

A cross-linguistic study of English and Spanish civil engineering metaphors

| Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

This chapter provides a cross-linguistic and multimodal study of some civil engineering zoomorphic metaphors in English and Spanish within a socio-cognitive and multimodal approach. This study thus aims to examine the interaction of multimodal (linguistic and visual) metaphoric and metonymic mappings (Forceville 2009, 2010) in some civil engineering zoomorphic examples. Principles from discourse analysis are applied (Semino 2008; Deignan 2005) by using contextualized and corpora-driven data. The results reveal lop-sided layers of metaphoricity merged with interacting metonymic patterns. In the cross-­linguistic analysis, significant variations appear between English and Spanish which may respond to lexical aspects of meaning construction patterns as well as sociocultural differences (Kövecses 2008).

Keywords: cross-linguistic study, engineering communication, linguistic/visual metaphor and metonymy, technical language analysis
Published online: 31 March 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.262.08rol
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