A COGNITIVE AND CORPUS PERSPECTIVE OF METAPHORICAL NOMINATION IN ENGLISH NUCLEAR TERMINOLOGY

This article attempts to address the problem of nomination in the terminology system of nuclear power and the potential of the metaphor as a means of nomination. By analyzing specific terms of nuclear industry, the authors attempt to reconstruct the cognitive mechanisms of nomination and productive cognitive models of the nomination that are used in the terminology of nuclear industry. The findings are verified using corpus-based methods. The data set used in this study allows to argue that metaphor is a productive means of nomination for the phenomena of nuclear industry. Moreover, such mechanism of nomination allows language users to create stable and consistent clusters terms which sometimes rely upon a single cognitive metaphor. Arguably, the existence of such clusters means that the models underlying these nominations have universal cognitive foundations, which significantly simplifies the development of special terminologies and confirms a range of theoretical assumptions about the birth of new terms. Nominations in nuclear industry rely on the metaphorical potential of the terms of kinship, biological processes, names of body parts, ‘up-down’ opposition and other spheres of human activity. Having compiled a custom corpus of nuclear English, we are able to analyze how these metaphorical nominations work in popular and professional nuclear discourse. The data for the corpus was retrieved from popular and specialized publications, as well as mainstream media.