Conceptual metaphor source domains in technical prose
Parent: Mixed metaphors and catachresis as signs of reflexive figurative language · Published reference · snapshot 2026-09-23
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Source-anchored research for Conceptual metaphor source domains in technical prose. Run status: COMPLETED.
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Facts and statements
- Lakoff defines a conceptual metaphor as a systematic mapping from a source domain (e.g. journeys) to a target domain (e.g. love); the mapping licenses source-domain language and inference patterns for the target. (high confidence) [source]
- Source domains are typically more concrete than targets; ARGUMENT is understood via WAR, so 'attack' and 'win' apply to arguments. (high confidence) [source]
- Software-development prose draws on a small set of source domains: construction (building a house), agriculture (garden), skilled craft, and finance (technical debt with interest). (medium confidence) [source]
- Each source-domain lexical item may or may not use the mapping; conventional words in the source domain are not always conventional in the target, so extending a metaphor with new source vocabulary is a novel act, not automatic. (medium confidence) [source]
- A corpus study on Common Crawl (Aono et al., 2024) found verb metaphors take direct objects with lower concreteness, imageability and familiarity, and appear more in emotional, subjective sentences; this supports abstract-target claims but suggests technical, unemotional prose may use fewer live metaphors. (medium confidence) [source]
- Overextending a source domain beyond the initial need creates false equivalences and limits reflection. (low confidence) [source]
- Critics say conceptual metaphors are often set up from intuitive, unsystematic evidence, and corpus-based validation is limited. (low confidence) [source]
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