Metaforos populiarojo mokslo literatūroje: Richard Dawkins knygos analizė

The following paper discusses metaphor usage in the genre of popular science. The object of this analysis is a chapter called ‘Immortal coils’ taken from Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene. The study discusses the impact of creative conceptual metaphors on the construction of the overall meaning of the text, as well as the significance of their linguistic manifestations and context. In focusing on the genre of popular science, it also makes an attempt at defining potential difficulties of metaphorical language usage from the perspective of lay readers. The trade-off between the simplification and clarity introduced by the metaphors is explored through the means of the metalanguage provided by the author and the reader responses provided as reviews of the book. A qualitative analysis was performed exclusively on extended novel metaphors based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson with an added layer of Deliberate Metaphor Theory proposed by Steen. The results show that while the text often draws from the same source domains as the specialist publications, the difference lies in some novel exploitations and extensions of the conventionalized metaphors