ИСТИНА

Metaphors play a vital role in scientific communication as they are widely spread across different genres and areas of academic discourse fulfilling various functions (Johnson 2010; Herrmann 2013; Fallyn 2000). Being of huge generative creative power, metaphors account for the term formation as well (Alexeeva 1998). Appearing as novel they first spread within a particular genre and proving their heuristic potential they get fossilized in a term. However, this ongoing evolution of linguistic units still requires more empirical corpus evidence especially when we deal with complicated cases with the source domain for a metaphor being a culturally specific concept. Culturally specific concepts are characterized by a broad content with several characteristics comprising it. Culturally specific concepts do not usually give rise to metaphors , yet when they do, they undergo peculiar transformations focusing on one single characteristic. Using the Pubmed database as our corpus we have identified and analysed about 200 tokens for the Rosetta stone metaphor and 800 for the Trojan horse one. Based on the quantitative data we suppose 3 major stages the cultural metaphor undergoes to become a term. First, the novel metaphor gets accepted and starts being used in a particular discipline conforming to the already established conceptual metaphors. For instance, the metaphor of the Rosetta stone started to work well within the discourse of contemporary molecular biology with its linguistic conceptual metaphor. The metaphor of molecular Trojan horses is clearly in line with the war metaphor used in immunity studies and drug production. Second, it changes the genre and scope of its use: appearing at high impact journals preferably in review papers, it goes on spreading across lower-impact journals and research articles. Third, the new term appears at a point when the metaphor is on the verge of becoming a conventional way of expressing some content with one feature brought to the limelight. Finally the term gets accepted and forms its own collocation range: 1) Recently, a general method was proposed to identify interacting proteins by identifying a ‘Rosetta Stone’ protein consisting of two unrelated proteins fused in one organism but expressed as separate polypeptides in other organisms. 2) Delivery of Biologics Across the Blood-Brain Barrier with Molecular Trojan Horse Technology.