Metaphors and Shells in Anatomy: Bulgarian-English Cross-Linguistic Study

This book is a research into the metaphorical nature of anatomical terms based on a cognitive linguistcs framework. It also investigates shell words in anatomy, especially in connection with the so-called termini generales. Those terms are in studied great detail as heads of compound terms and their indexical character is firmly established. The study also rejects the commonly held view of the pervasiveness of metaphor in anatomical science by aplying semantic analysis based on Evans's TLCCM and the Career of Metaphor Theory of Bowdle and Gentners'. The research utilises a large trilingual corpus to make a distinction between metaphor in term nomination and its perception in language use. The study holds the view that metaphors in anatomy can not be explicitly referred to as "dead", and according to the language manifestations, a relative degree of "revival" of the metaphoricity for the individual terms can be established. An important methodological consideration in the metaphorical analysis is that a search for the so-called linguistic metaphors has been performed, i.e. for us the most important factor is the linguistic side of metaphoricity.