Chapter 10
Creative journeys
Metaphors of metastasis in press popularization articles
This chapter draws on the notion of creative recontextualization to explore how metastasis is recontextualized through metaphor in a bilingual English-Spanish corpus of press popularization articles on cancer. The quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed marked cross-cultural differences. Thus, while the English subcorpus presents the process with little metaphorical aid, the Spanish subcorpus displays a wider array of images involving movement. Nevertheless, the use of metaphor in both subcorpora generally involved a creative recontextualization of the source domains found in more specialized scientific genres for metastasis (invasion and colonization, dissemination and migration) through the ‘opening up’ of theory-constitutive metaphors. In addition, a particularly creative strategy was the personification of biological entities, which were vilified and portrayed as participating in delinquent activities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Metastasis and its metaphors in specialized genres
- 3.Materials and methods
- 4.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of metaphors of metastasis
- 4.1Invasion and colonization metaphors
- 4.2
dissemination metaphors
- 4.3Migration metaphors
- 4.4Journey metaphors
- 5.Personification
- 6.Creative exploitation of metastasis metaphors
- 6.1Intertextual metaphors in the English subcorpus
- 6.2Creative patterning in the Spanish subcorpus
- 6.2.1Metaphorical clusters in the reporting of metastasis
- 6.2.2Creative elaboration and extension in the Spanish press
- 7.Conclusions
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References