ИСТИНА

Metaphors have always attracted attention of cognitive linguistics for offering inside on how new ideas emerge, how they are transformed with advances in knowledge and how they are thus explained and disseminated. Since “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff, Johnson, 1980, p. 5), it amounts to a tool for clarifying, elucidating and simplifying the complicated abstract concepts of science. No matter scientific discourse is to be simple and informative, metaphors pertain to its dynamics leading to terminology formation. This potential for the terminology to be formed is high for culture specific concepts like Trojan Horse and Rosetta Stone. Used in quite a variety of contexts these metaphors first retaining the broad conceptual content, gradually become terms when the conceptual dominant is not only profiled but fixed. Recent works in cognitive linguistics argue the significant role of broad cultural knowledge being stored and structured in various culturally specific concepts (Komova 2005, 2013). The analysis of the corpus data shows that the dominant evokes mental representations of the cultural content acting like a key to the piece of discourse and determining the meaning of the set of phrases in the text e.g: Molecular Trojan Horses are brain transport vectors; proteins would not be the Rosetta Stone for unraveling the true secret of life. Understanding complicated metaphors in science with source domains of the kind in terms of a concept with the identified core and periphery zones opens up new possibilities for the analysis of target domains being no less complicated. Moreover, outlining the conceptual dominant within the concept structure helps to predict the development of metaphor in late 19 and 20th centuries. Therefore, we put forward that cultural knowledge represented by metaphors in scientific discourse should be approached from a broad cognitive linguistic perspective, especially investigating the conceptual structure. We also stress that given the growing role of metaphor in science the cultural component in teaching ESP should not be dismissed.