Metaphern in Fachdiskursen – kontrastiv und interdisziplinär. Einleitung zum Themenheft

Metaphors in specialized discourses – Comparative and interdisciplinary analyses: An introduction to the special issue:
This special issue brings together theoretical reflection and empirically grounded studies on metaphor in specialized and institutional communication. Building on the German section of the CERLIS conference Metaphors in Specialized Discourse In and Across Cultures, the issue expands its scope to a broader range of specialized discourses and communicative settings. The contributions examine metaphor in political discourse, health communication, science, education, advertising, and literature. They draw on semantic, cognitive, pragmatic, discourse-analytic, phenomenological, and culturally oriented approaches and employ mainly qualitative, as well as corpus-based and contrastive methods. Particular attention is paid to the functional role of metaphor in conceptualization, communication, persuasion, and the articulation of subjective experience. Several contributions also adopt a cross-linguistic perspective, focusing in particular on the German-Italian language pair and highlighting both cultural and language-specific patterns.