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Preface

We are happy to announce the fourth volume of metaphorik.de. The incessant interest and the far-reaching acceptance of our forum have become – during the last months – a motivation for improving our online platform and our editorial activities. The results are, on the one hand, reflected in several more or less visible changes – we introduced a new review section where books can be ordered directly and we revised our bibliography and link list – while on the other hand we decided to venture the new format of special issues. The main aim of these thematically bound editions is to concentrate on relevant social and scientific questions, and to investigate the role of metaphor and metonymy in specific domains of discourse. The present issue Metaphor and Ecology – co-edited by Wilhelm Trampe from the Institut für Kommunikationsökologie (Duisburg) – is a first step towards this new format that hopefully will find interested readers and enlarge the scope of metaphorik.de.

The list of contributions in the current issue can be divided into two sections of which the first investigates the role of metaphor in environmental discourse. The main question is: What kind of metaphors do we use when we speak about environmental topics? Thus, Brigitte Nerlich analyses, from a semasiological angle, the constitutive character of the metaphor of silent spring in the discourse on the environment from 1998 to 2002. Andrea Gerbig and Patricia Buchtmann investigate the different dimensions of a figurative language in-use by tracing the discoursive shifts between the German discourse on the so-called Waldsterben and a current media campaign that uses the buzz-phrase Geiz ist geil. These discourse related studies will be complemented by Richard Alexander’s article that examines the metaphorical and discoursive strategies of Vandana Shiva in the BBC-Reith Lectures on western and third world agriculture: Shiva opposes and deconstructs the western economic understanding of sustainability with a more ecologically orientated comprehension of it in the Third World.

The second section uses the metaphor of ecology as a heuristic instrument in linguistics: the notion of ecology comprises - in this context - the natural and cultural environment. Thus, Peter Finke explores the heuristic dimensions and the reflexive metaphorical potentials of mistletoes, woods and frogs in order to illustrate his notion of language as a life form. Used as a source domain these ‘in-between’ or ‘bridging entities’ possess a structuring force that question the limits of our everyday knowledge, language and life. Roslyn Frank, furthermore, shows in her examination of the Basque that these limits could be found in a language itself: The Basque notion of ‘self’ could not be compared to any self conception in other European languages, it possesses a unique context by which the shifts of the self in Basque are determined and thus different. Dorte Bay, Sune Vork Steffensen and Jørgen Døør analyse these dimensions on a more general level. They underline the blending function of metaphor, a function that constitutes a modality crucially dependent on a cultural and natural context and on metaphor. Last but not least, Gesine Schiewer shows that these questions are of high relevance for a social and cultural understanding of the environment that should include – in the framework of an ecologically motivated theory of psychology – the psychological dimensions of linguistic behaviour and acting.

All contributions are accessible in the html- and in the pdf-format. The download of files containing graphical elements may cause some delay of time. Also, the quality of the visualization depends on the type of browser you use. We apologise for any troubles!

We hope that the present issue underlines the relevance of linguistics for questions concerning ecology and the heuristic dimensions for an ecological approach to language. The environment could, in this sense, no longer be regarded as a pure nature ‘out there’, but as a sum of linguistically constructed and socially shaped ‘natures’ to which the sciences alone offer no access. Thus, an ecological approach to language may be an acute and necessary element in environmental management.

Bonn, July 2003

Martin Döring
Klaus Gabriel
Katrin Mutz
Dietmar Osthus
Claudia Polzin-Haumann
Nikola Roßbach
Wilhelm Trampe

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ISSN 1618-2006