Metáforas lexicais em estruturas verbais e mentais em notícias de popularização da ciência

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation was to identify and describe lexical metaphors in popular science news (PSN) from lexicogrammatical elements. Based on Systemic- Functional Linguistics we worked with the concepts of lexical metaphor, grammatical metaphor and transitivity in order to analyze lexical metaphors in 30 PSN selected from the magazines BBC News International and Scientific American (Motta-Roth, 2007). Through transitivity we observed the structures specified by each process and the meanings which are typical to them. When these meanings are built in a nonliteral or non-congruent way we have a lexical metaphor which is caused by the semantic tension between the process and its participant(s). A lexical metaphor can be a metaphor when there is a relation of similarity between the terms; a metonymy when there is a contiguity relation between terms; and a personification when terms related to inanimate things are described as having human abilities or characteristics. From our analysis we found more occurrence of metaphor, followed by the occurrence of metonymy and personification. The metaphors showed varied semantic fields although the most common ones referred to war and engineering. The most common metonymies were the kind that studies, reports and results were named instead their researchers (research by researcher) and the kind that research institutions as well as health or government institutions were named instead their responsible members (institution by responsible), depersonalizing the subjects. Most of metonymy cases were at the same time classified as personifications in which mainly researches and institutions became agents which create and spread scientific knowledge and perform varied actions related to decisions in the scientific field. Thus, lexical metaphors were widely found in our corpus, mainly in dependent projected clauses.