CLASSIFYING MEDICAL METAPHORS: OBSERVATIONS ON CATEGORIZING LEXIS-THRIVING METAPHORS IN ENGLISH FOR DENTISTS

Abstract

While classifying medical metaphors as part of an extensive study, we faced multiple categorization challenges. In the present article, we analyze some of the major challenges in terms of classifying metaphoric instances found in the specialized English textbook English for Dentists by E. Belova, M. Gokzaev, and J. German (2022). To extract the metaphoric instances, we relied on the free corpus analysis software AntConc. The theoretical background of the research is grounded in the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which views thinking itself as a metaphorical process.
While Lakoff and Johnson defined conceptual metaphor as a phenomenon in its own right, we are especially interested in the significance of the realizations of conceptual metaphors at the level of language, in other words, their metaphoric instances. Moreover, the scope of our research is limited to metaphors and their metaphoric instances in Medical English, with a further narrowing of our focus on Specialized Medical English textbooks, i.e. textbooks of Specialized English for students in the medical fields.
Thus, the methodology used is tailored to Medical English and is further augmented by a six-field categorization of medical metaphors: “Body parts and substances”, “Scientific fields, specialists, characteristics, and wards”, “Abnormal conditions”, “Drugs and likes”, “Instruments and equipment”, and “Patient and treatment”. In addition, the understanding of there being two major types of medical metaphors, lexis-thriving and discourse based, is relied on. The former type is further subdivided into unilemma and multilemmata.
In the article, we examine the distinctive problematics for unilemma and multilemma caused by polysemy, autohyperonymy, and synonymy. To do so, we analyze the cases of neck, process, canal, introspection and self-observation, among others. Furthermore, we demarcate the dividing line between a unilemma with combinatory variants and a unilemma with corresponding multilemmata. The latter concerns a unilemma and one or more multilemmata that have a common main word with the unilemma in question. Such an example can be found in the unilemma palate and the two multilemmata hard palate and soft palate. We demonstrate that this hard/soft palate couple is, indeed, a couple of multilemmata by virtue of being separate medical terms (which identify two distinct anatomical structures) and oppose it to instances of a unilemma with combinatory variants as in right tonsil and left tonsil which both correspond to the unilemma tonsil.
Our research on such unilemma and multilemma instances, along with the identifying some main challenges to their classification, has allowed us to reach conclusions about ways to classify lexis-thriving metaphoric instances in Specialized English textbooks that hold true not only for the field of dental medicine, but for Medical English in general.