Conceptual Metaphor and Text Development: a Narratological Perspective

Abstract

This study attempts to analyse the structural role of metaphor in a specific text- type. For this purpose, we chose a specific genre, a popular magazine about scientific topics, the National Geographic (NG), and one of the typical texts of that magazine, the story of a natural disaster, an earthquake. Hypothesizing that every text displays a specific metaphoric configuration that will, in a sense, constitute the metaphorical identity of that text, the study explains how we can identify in a specific text the structure of its metaphorical relations. Having identified the conceptual keys which link the experiential domains activated by the text in the conceptualization of a disastrous event like an earthquake, the study then explores the interaction between common metaphorical conceptualizations and their text-specific configurations through narrative processing. Using a Labovian framework, the research perspective attempts to describe how the metaphoric conceptualization of earthquakes is linked to text development and narrative processing. Thus, working along the interface between cognition and discourse, the study demonstrates the utility of uncovering in text the relationship between universal human conceptualization, social experience and discourse structure.