August 2009 Volume 5 Issue 2
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Article Title
Conceptual Metaphors in Academic Medical Research Articles

Author
Philippa Mungra
Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Rome

Bio Data
Philippa Mungra is a trained biologist and has been a lecturer in English at the First Medical School of the University of Rome “La Sapienza” for the past 12 years. Her current research priorities revolve around the structure and evolution of specialist medico-scientific publications from a communicative and textual point of view. She has recently published a textbook for reading and writing skills within the new 5-year syllabus for Italian Medical Schools (Reading Skills in Medical English, AntonioDelfinoEditore, Rome, 2005).

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Abstract
Figurative language comprehension has strong connections within the area of metaphor. While research has been done in classic English literature and poetry on metaphors, and some attention has been paid to the areas of economics and finance, very little attention has been paid to metaphors in the medical or scientific literature. We conducted an observational study of linguistic metaphors in a small pilot corpus of the discussion sections of medical research articles. We observed two groups of metaphors. The first group consisted of primary metaphors using input domains relating to bodily experience or to a cultural one, such as container, movement, fictive motion and justice. A smaller group of metaphors were found to be blends of words or phrases. Here an explanation of the formation of these metaphors and blends is given.   

Key words: metaphor, research articles, medical literature, conceptual blends, mapping of metaphor domains.