Az információ hatalom. Az információ hétköznapi metaforái
Information is Power: Everyday Metaphors for Information

Summary/Abstract: Using cognitive metaphor theories, the paper examines how we understand and see infor-mation. The overview touches upon possible source domains, orientational metaphors re-lated to information, metaphors used in information history terminology and the question of the universality of these metaphors. It comes to the conclusion that we treat information as a valuable thing kept in a tank (as an animal, liquid or object made up of several pieces) the possession of which gives the possessor power. Moreover, we typically imagine this thing as something that is in motion. Our everyday metaphors are also noticeable in scien-tific terminology because metaphor is an essential tool in human cognition and conceptual-ization. By comparing several languages different in terms of genealogy, typology and areal features (English, Finnish, Icelandic, Japanese, Latin, Polish, German, Italian, Rus-sian,Turkish), the paper demonstrates that this perception is true for speakers of different languages and thus is most probably universal. The reason for this is that our knowledge is encyclopedic and is not separable from our knowledge about the world. The discussed metaphors build on the human body, human nature and our natural surroundings, all of which are always the same everywhere as far as their general characteristics are concerned – unlike social, economic or cultural conditions.

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