Las metáforas en textos de ingeniería civilestudio contrastivo español-inglés.

Résumé

This doctoral dissertation deals with metaphor in Civil Engineering texts. It is studied from two perspectives: as a linguistic metaphoric expression which helps to create a terminology, and as a mental device, as a cognitive tool. The main result of this study is the creation of a bilingual (Spanish-English/ English-Spanish) annotated corpus and glossary of technical metaphors. It compiles 265 entries. The thesis is divided into four chapters: the first one is about the semantic, pragmatic and cognitive theories of metaphor; its parts, classes and the ways of identifying them. The second chapter is concerned with metaphor in pure scientific and technical texts and metaphor translation procedures in that context such as: direct translation, deletion, substitution, metaphor into non-metaphor and non-metaphor into metaphor. The third chapter explains the functional, formal and discursive characteristics of the corpus, its design, materials and data collection. Finally, the last chapter is devoted to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative results of linguistic metaphorical expressions, cognitive metaphors as well as its interlinguistic comparison. The main conclusions of the study are that metaphors in technical Civil Engineering texts are not used to express emotions or mental states but to express professional events. In fact, machinery and different constructions are named by means of metaphorical mental images.