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In:Metaphor in Specialist Discourse:
Edited by J. Berenike Herrmann and Tony Berber Sardinha
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 4] 2015
► pp. 245–270

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Metaphor, news discourse and knowledge

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Published online: 16 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.4.10cam
The aim of this study is to analyse the role of metaphor in the dissemination of specialised knowledge through the discourse of newspaper articles. A bilingual English and Spanish newspaper corpus of 100 science popularisation articles on cancer (The Guardian and El País) was used to analyse and examine the metaphorical expressions employed to describe cancer aetiology and three pathological cellular processes involved in the disease. Metaphors were identified according to the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz group, 2007). The analysis showed that different source domains are required for the recontextualisation of cancer, with certain source domains being preferred. The selection of source domains appears to depend on the cancer-related aspect (target) and, to some extent, on the language of the newspaper.
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