Speaking about the Brain. Metaphors in popular scientific texts

Masters Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, TU Dortmund (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: This paper deals with metaphorical representations of the human brain (i.e. brain metaphors) in popular scientific texts. A corpus consisting of forty (newspaper) articles is analysed by applying Fauconnier and Turners Conceptual Integration Networks (1998, 2002). The work is embedded in the field of Cognitive Linguistics and tries to offer some insights in how we conceptualise the human brain in popular science, revealing the nature of meaning creation as well as sketching the reciprocal interdependence of the human brain and machines as the predominant popular scientific paradigm of conceptualising human nature.