FIGURATIVE USE OF LANGUAGE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

New technologies have pervaded many aspects of modern life and influenced human communication, emotions and language. This close interaction between people and computers is reflected in language, in the use of computing terms applied to human emotions, relationships and everyday activities. Metaphor plays an important role in the language of information technology and it is widely used in creating new vocabulary. This paper explores conceptual metaphors in order to determine their usage in the information technology research papers, through describing similarities and differences in the conceptualisation of these metaphors within two languages. The aim of the paper is to quantitatively and qualitatively present conceptual metaphors, regarding computers and the Internet, found in ten research papers written in English and in Serbian. These expressions are compared with respect to their frequency in the papers and the degree to which metaphorical vocabulary is present in analysed research papers. The results indicate that all authors have used conceptual metaphors, although papers in Serbian include a slightly larger number of expressions than papers in English. Apart from differences and diversities, the analysis also identifies a remarkably similar structure of the mapping in both languages.